The Holiday - Day 4

This was our best day yet!
The morning dawned sunny and lovely and WARM. It must have been 12 degrees (which to us felt a great deal warmer than the blizzard and -5 temps that we left at home)
So donning shoes and sweaters and leaving coats off, we scrambled into the car fairly early to make the one hour drive to Indianapolis and the Children's Museum.

What a cool place this is.


4 levels of interactive fun for all ages!

Behind the boys here is a water clock, and every hour they would have a presentation that had about 30 small globes of water that would fillup over the course of an hour and rush out on the hour to fill a larger globe of water. It fascinated them.

I loved that just about all the exhibits had something for them to touch and play with


The boys loved being Nascar racers


They had a merry-go-round


A great toddler place full of sand boxes and water fun (water bibs provided)


Chris even took the big boys to the planetarium for a few presentations that Matthew enjoyed and Duncan LOVED because he's our space nut. My BIL took the smaller kids to the toddler area and to the acquariums
Look - it's DORY!



Then my BIL took them on a real sub


I didn't even post all the pics from the curious george exhibit and the Robots exhibit - both of which were cool becuase they had something in each one for kids of different ages.
Curious George had a rocket slide and a play elevator for Joey, a mechanical building machine for the older boys, and Duncan especially liked the drafting station - he made a blueprint for his house, so maybe he'll be an architect when he grows up - he really liked it.
Then we went to the Robots exhibit that had a "build a robot" station for Joey, and plenty of computerized robot activities for Matthew and a build a robot on computer for my 6 yr old geek in training!

We stayed right until closing time (5pm) which meant a lot of walking for the little guy, and the big boys didn't even want to leave, but we thought we'd better get out of the city so we could get home in decent time for dinner, and Rushhour in Indy had already started!
We stopped at MacD's for a drink and ordered Duncan his favourite iced tea - which is very different in the US and you must ask for Sweet Tea or you'll get this nasty sludge water. So I hand the boys their drinks and Duncan takes one sip and says YUCK - so I try it, and sure enough they gave us sludge water, so I walked back in and was accosted by a lady sitting outside begging for money. went inside and exchanged the sludge water for SWEET Tea. Came back outside and took a sip to hand back to the boys and BLECK - Now it was sweetened sludge water, so I said forget it, they don't know how to do Iced Tea south of the border, so I walked back and handed begging lady the tea and said would you like a drink, and she greedily took it and said "what I really want is a hamberger and fries" so I took her "thanks" and walked in and bought the boy a coke and we were on our way back to Kokomo. If the lady had been the least bit grateful, I probably would have bought her a hamburger and fries too although in retrospect it's hard to be thankful for sweetened sludge water. I probably should have just bought her a meal anyway, although I had no more US cash on me. I guess I feel a little bad about that - we had a lovely day not worrying about anything at all, just enjoying ourselves and buying whatever we felt like buying - we are very blessed, while others are begging for food.
Joey fell asleep within 10 minutes of being on the road, and I was hoping the other boys would settle down on the way back but they seemed to be infused with that kid energy that you wish you could harness and sell to tired holidaying parents.

Luckily all the excitement of the day caught up with them and they were all in bed by 8pm - a quiet evening at last!