Indy Children's Museum

We finally made a trip to the Children's Museum in Indianapolis, the largest children's museum in the world. We were waiting for Ashlyn to be old enough to appreciate it. And she sure did. This museum was awesome! They had enough exhibitions to keep us busy for 6 hours, and we could have stayed longer if they hadn't been closing. We would move from exhibit to exhibit, trying to get the top choices in, promising Ashlyn that we would return when we were done. Each exhibit she didn't want to leave, until she saw the next one. I think we did get to return to one at the very end for 15 minutes before they closed. I think she chose the Legos. 

Here are some pictures from our trip.  

First, here is a shot of the outside with Justin's fancy panoramic camera on his phone. The blog doesn't show the whole thing, but if you click on it, it will enlarge it and should display it all. 

Full/Life size dinosaur trying to get into the museum.

We were greeted by a life-size Bumblebee Transformer (can you call it life-size if they are not real?) (I'm not sure if you can tell, but we are up a level. You can see the people in the background to get a size comparison.)

This was one of her favorites. It had to do with the glass sculpture that runs through the core of the Museum. Not much to it, but she could spend hours putting those funny bulbs in and out, arranging them, rearranging them...

Large multi-storied blown glass sculpture, mentioned above.

They had elevators, but mostly we used these ramps that wound up to each floor of the museum (5 floors.) Ashlyn would run and run and run until we told her which floor to get off at. Sometimes all we could see of her was her curly hair bobbing up and down. 

The Hot Wheels Exhibit. They had 5 or 6 full-sized real cars based off of a few hot wheels.  It was a pretty sweet "car show" for the adults, talking about the history of hot wheels, etc. ,  and then they had ramps and ramps set up where the kids could play with hot wheels. She loved it, of course. 

Her favorite was the Lego exhibit

Justin really liked it too. (Considering he has a huge tub of Legos under his desk....)

Hi Mom!

They had display after display of some pretty neat Lego creations

Completely made of Legos, VROOM VROOM!!!

The Flight Simulator...not sure she really watched the screens...she just liked the steering

Justin probably had more fun than Ashlyn at this one. It was a huge water table with locks, boats, etc. His favorite was backing up all the water, and releasing it all at once so that the water rushed forward, and then watching the reactions of the kids downstream. This was one he wanted to come back to when we made it through everything, but we never got the chance. 

Being a little animal in a log

"Look mom! I'm Glowing!"

An Ashlyn sized water table.

An Ashlyn sized (maybe a little bigger) sand table (you can see the water table in the background)

Overall it was a BLAST! We hope to go back at least once before we leave the area. We are thinking maybe when Grandma and Grandpa come into town for Justin's graduation. But we will see. It is a little costly (more than your local children's museums for sure) but worth every penny. Ashlyn STILL talks about it.