Today we went to the Indianapolis Children’s Museum, what a great children’s museum.
It’s very large and was changed from the last time we visited it.
Abby had a great time and was immediately excited about the large (6 foot) snow flakes hanging in the entry.
The children’s museum had 5 floors, each with various themes and exhibits.
One exhibit, that we took pictures at, was an Indy car.

We started at the top, floor 5, and made our way down slowly, but surely, to the second floor, and never made it to the first floor (it should be noted that the entry way was on the 2nd floor).
We went to a kiddy area that was geared towards 4 and under kids.
Abby was just overwhelmed with all of the options, but got to play with a fun water
exhibit that allowed her to splash, play with a rubber duck, and get wet.
Then she played in the sand with Jessica, Kelsey and Kristin (think wet hands in sand at first).
After that we went to a little sensory maze where Abby could walk over a small wooden suspension bridge, climb on large stuffed animals, crawl through a tube, and climb on a large stuffed bumpy thing that I can’t describe easily.
After the sensory (overload) exhibit Abby played in a play house, which was lots of fun for her as well.

We saw an exhibit on puppets, which included some video footage from Sesame Street and The Muppet Show.
Abby liked the puppets, but was more entertained by the pencils and paper at one of the puppet
exhibits (for writing scripts for your own puppet show).
I was impressed by the wide array of puppets that they had.
I didn’t even think about some of the examples of puppets they had that I had seen.

Another interesting display is an area geared more towards 5-11 year olds which includes a Rube Goldberg contraption that is fabulous.
They also had a turtle/frog display that was really large and then on top of that they had some stuffed (taxidermy) animals.
Abby learned that owls say hoo-hoo, which was cute.
I crawled through some tubes and tunnels with her so that we could go down a slide in that area, but it was hard because I’m so big and not so nimble any more.
It reminds me I need to get in better shape.

Eventually we made our way down to a really neat exhibit on building and construction.
One of the displays talked about building skyscrapers: 2,000 people died falling off of sky scrapers between 1900 and 1920 (10 a month or one every other day and a half).
They also had large examples of joints in wood working, which was neat.
There was a large yurt built in the exhibit that was just cool to look at.
There was no metal in the yurt, it was held together with a lot of animal and wood products.

After the museum we came back home and John and Jessica made dinner – Pork Chops.
After a tasty dinner we played some games: Risk, Pictionary and Aggravation.
I actually won a Risk game, but it was not a great victory, everyone else was finally so week that I could sweep in, but it was not as impressive as a sudden
clincher.
Pictionary started out fun but bogged down because we kept rolling low numbers so moving through the board took a long time.
We finally just quit playing and switched to Aggravation.
Aggravation was fun Karen and I won, but it took a long time because we kept getting sent back to our bases.

Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve and there’s rumors of more cookies being made.
Currently there are six different kinds of candy, two types of cookies and some fudge.
If we don’t leave heavier than we came it is only because the Lord granted us self control.

Resting in Him,

Randy “Game Time” Peterman