Children's Museum Adventure

 

We love to adventure with the boys - especially when our adventures include an educational element.  This week he had the opportunity to visit the children's museum in Indianapolis.  The boys LOVE the hands-on exhibits.  They wore themselves out exploring our great big world.  I love watching them learn and greatly look forward to them getting a little older so they can take more time reading and understanding the fantastic displays!

Here is a peek at our adventure this week:

 The Dinosphere is an incredibly cool experience with life sized dinosaur skeletons!  There are computerized simlations, an archeology digging area, costumes and play eggs, toy dinosaurs and so much more.  We had to visit this area first - all 5 of the "big" kids insisted.


Manasseh got to touch a REAL dinosaur bone.  Many of the displays are models, and he was excited to have the opportunity to put his hands on a real bone from a real dinosaur.  That is big stuff for a 4 year old (or a 34 year old).





All 6 Poppy's Posse members: Princess, Bugman, Spaceman, $, Moo, and Scout.   They had a blast together (they usually do).

 

Princess said her favorite area was "Jolly Days" - the seasonal exhibit.   The boys, therefore, also said it was their favorite.  They liked climbing, fishing, skating, and taking care of the reindeer.  I got a kick out of my guys, Spaceman (above) found a bucket in the reindeer room and decided he should milk the reindeer.  His brother, naturally followed suit.

The Hot Wheels exhibit was pretty cool too.  the boys loved playing with the cars, especially the large ones they cold climb inside.  In the picture above, Cassius had enough of waiting for a turn and climbed inside on top of Bugman's lap so he could drive.

 

We stayed for just under 6 hours.  My boys were exhausted.  Scout fell asleep in the Hot Wheels exhibit and missed the end of the day.  The other boys fell asleep before we were out of Indianapolis.

I give the Indianapolis Children's Museum 5 stars for their hands on activities and family friendliness.  Parking is free.  There are food options in the museum, however they are more pricey than I like.  We brought a sack lunch and ate it in the van.     The museum is very clean and offers hand sanitizers in many locations.  Although the restrooms are very heavily used, they were always clean when we used them (with 6 kids we used the restroom quite a bit).

Advent Day 16

It's another "Candle Sunday".  This week our theme is "joy".  We talked about joy being like happiness.  They are similar because joy is actively choosing to recognize our contentment because of God's gifts in our life.  We talked about the gift of Jesus and sang "Joy to the World".  

We lit the candles together and remembered what each of the purple candles on our wreath stands for.  The boys prayed thanks to God for the joy that we have and for giving us Jesus.  To close our devotion time at the dinner table, they each got to use permanent markers (with very close supervision) to color an ornament that says "joy" on it.  They later put pipe cleaners through the small holes at the top of their ornaments and hung them pridefully on the tree!

Thank you God, that even in times of sorrow, you are our joy.  Your joy is my strength and when I have fear and doubt myself, I can rely on that strength to accomplish my daily tasks.  Amen.