Day 2 of "Indy" Spring Break

So, here we are on our first "full" day of our vacation. Where does it find Allison and I but nowhere else than a Children's Museum...a behemoth children's museum at that. I had no idea that the Indianapolis Children's Museum was so massive. My goodness!

I will have to do some study on the funding of the museum. It is by far the best children's museum we have been to, and we have been to small town, small/average city, to large city museums. The technology in the museum is very high quality, especially for a museum geared toward kids.

When you first arrive at the museum, you see the picture below. A HUGE dinosaur, and a baby dinosaur, crashing through the window/wall. It certainly does catch one's attention. :)

I'm not entirely sure how to describe the layout of the museum. There is a huge area that you walk into, and then there is a courtyard sort of thing I suppose that has a square "roundabout" ramp area that goes up 4 floors I believe. We ended up heading down to the lower level, and coming into contact with a glass and color display. These "balls with stems" are hollow and 'stick' on a form with knobs sticking out of it...holders sort of thing. You can switch around all sorts of colors and shapes. It is very cool, but didn't hold the attention too long...too much other stuff awaiting. Above our heads, in the ceiling, is a blown glass design. It's very pretty and the lighting is different - bright colors, but still kinda muted and dark.

Barbie... Need I say more?!?!? This ended up being the highlight of the entire museum visit, perhaps even entire vacation! This was an exhibit that was scheduled to leave March 27 I believe.

I got really excited when I saw this in a display case....I HAD THIS motor home and fold up chairs!!!!!!

The exhibition was really a big area; there was even a fashion show "runway" and there was a mini-fashion show runway and dressing room for the doll size Barbies.

Although she never mentioned it before this, Allison told me that she wanted to be a hairdresser when she grows up!

Although not too sure at the beginning, she did get into the clothes changing and putting on a fashion show. To the right in this picture, there were two big cameras fastened on tripods with working flash, and kids would stand behind the cameras and be the 'paparazzi' during the fashion show.

There were many display cases of different types of Barbies, the history of Barbie, Barbie over the years, and this is an example of the very first Barbie. How cool it would be to get one of these!

Another of the temporary exhibits was this LEGO exhibit. It was fun, and she did get into it more than I had initially thought.

It has wheels and it really drives! There was even a kiosk to take a picture and have it emailed back home; it was cool and we got all the way to having entered our email address, but an error message came back twice that it couldn't connect to system, so...we had to settle for this picture.

And how cool is this? A life size LEGO car! :)

DINO- exhibit....this was putting a type of gold/bronze silly putty on a dinosaur skeleton part to resemble muscles.....

Now we have entered the Mr. Potato Head exhibit. It had some very cute things to play and play with.

I can't totally explain why, but I really liked this one....Mr. Potato Head has a swimming mask on and looks like he is peeking under water...and you can pretend to be underwater with him....:)

I also LOVED this clock. I would really like to have a miniature version of this clock. It's a water clock. The larger balls on the left fill up with blue water each hour, and the smaller balls on the right fill up with blue water every minute for five minute increments. So, the time on the clock at this time is like around12:30ish or so...I can't see exactly in this photo, and I don't remember for sure. It was easy to read and tell in person.