Review of the Indianapolis Children's Museum

Last Saturday the family and I took a weekend jaunt to Indianapolis for a night. We left at 8:30 a.m. on Saturday and drove right to the Indianapolis Children's Museum. It is my hope that X-man will equate the word museum with fun and learning (because it's a huge source of frustration for MacTroll that I find most adult-themed museums boring).

The museum isn't the cheapest around. It cost $14.50 per adult and $9.50 per child (ages 2 and up). But parking is "free" in a large lot across the street, and the museum is very easy to find, although it's not in a heavily commercial area. So, if you're going to have lunch, you're going to want to eat at the cafeteria in the museum because there aren't any restaurants visible that are within walking distance. The museum is also NOT part of the Association of Children's Museums, so if you have a membership to ACM through your local children's museum, it won't get you in for free in Indy.

We arrived around 11:30 a.m. When we turned the corner to find parking, X-man saw the large dinosaur sculptures outside the building and started shouting, "I'm stuck! I'm stuck! Unbuckle me. Time to get out!" He was uber excited, but we still had to park. The parking garage was near full. We ended up on the top level in the sun. The skywalk to the museum was closed due to some construction/expansion going on, but once we got to the main lobby the wait in line for tickets was only a few minutes.  

I'm going to be truthful. We didn't get to see the entire museum. At just turning 3, X-man has a 2 1/2 hour time limit before he's ready to crash. Even if he thinks he wants to press on, the poor, little dude's coordination goes when he gets fatigued. But I will highlight most everything we saw including:

The Power of Children is an exhibit dedicated to kids who managed to make the world a better place. Kids like Ruby Bridges, who opened the door for kids of all races to go to school with one another and Ryan White who helped legions of people understand the horrific and unnecessary discrimination people placed on people with AIDS in the 1980s due to fear and ignorance about the disease. X-man was too young for most of the exhibit, where they have movies and real school re-enactments of what it was like to go to a segregated school. But what he did enjoy was the tree of promise at the front of the exhibit that allows you to type in a goal you have in your life and add it to the tree. He also dug the TV camera portion, even though he knew he couldn't read the teleprompter. :-) 

One of the new exhibits in the basement of the museum is all about glass art. I've seen these glass pieces hung in Las Vegas and in the Atlantis resort in the Bahamas. Large, colorful, like huge pieces of coral. The Indianapolis museum has one hanging in it's main ramp/stairway area. But in the basement, it has put the pieces of glass into the ceiling and created a circular couch that spins so people can check out all the different sizes and shapes the artist created. There are replica plastic pieces with sculptures the kids can safely move around.It's no secret that X-man likes trains. Indy has a small train exhibit in the basement. It has a replica real-sized steam train that sits next to a pretend play station (which also houses the obligatory Thomas the Tank Engine Table). But next to it is a great model railroad set up. In this picture X-man is standing on a booster step to see up at the model trains. But you can also see an arch underneath where the kids can crawl under (the railway has multiple levels, including running on the ground under the arch). There's also a secret "pop up" where the kids who crawl under can stand in the middle of the train area and watch a whole different part of the track. Additional track runs along the ceiling of this part of the museum  as well.
There is also a large dinosaur exhibit in the basement of the museum that focuses on dinosaur fossils. X-man checks out the Dino nests here, where kids are encouraged to dress up as dinosaurs and interact with the eggs in the nest. There is a dino dig portion, but it is small and very popular. If you get to the museum before it gets busy, you may want to start in the lower part and let your kids have a chance to dig up some dinosaur bones before the crowds fall in. X-man doesn't like to wait in lines, so we promised him he could dig up bones at the Orpheum in their dino exhibit when the weather got nicer. The museum is in Indianapolis, so I think it's probably obligatory for them to have some kind of race car. :-) X-man was very excited to be able to touch all the wheels and pretend to fix it while he waited for his turn to climb into the driver's seat. When he tried to reach the pedals, he literally disappeared under the steering wheel. But he did drive it with lots of "vroom vroom" noises until he realized another child was waiting for a turn. Then he gladly climbed out and said, "Next driver!"It's also no secret that my kid loves to build, so the Lego Castle Adventure on the 2nd floor of the museum was a huge hit with X-man. There are two Lego creation areas set up for kids to build their own castles or castle gardens, there's a Lego throne for kids to sit on and get their pictures taken, a video screen with a large catapult for kids to design their own castle wall that will defend the castle against intruders. Once they've chosen their wall design, kids have a chance to wind up the catapult, aim it at the wall they created on screen and launch a large boulder at it to see if it holds up. X-man didn't understand why he'd want a strong wall. He wanted to watch the boulder crash through it. So, we let him set the parameters on the touch screen himself, and when the wall came crashing down he applauded.X-man did run into some issues with being the little guy at the Lego table. The big kids had all the better pieces and none of them looked up for sharing with a 3 year old. So, when X-man looked over and found the large, rubber Lego area was empty, he grabbed MacTroll's hand and got to work on a real wall.We ate lunch at the cafeteria. It had a wide variety of foods. A lot that were, of course, not healthy, like pizza, burgers, fries, etc. But I was surprised to find a fruit salad and a garden salad available. The lines weren't too long at 1 p.m., and we had no trouble finding a table to sit at. Prices were also not very steep.

There was also a comic book hero exhibit starring all of the usual suspects: Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman. Even the Incredibles made an appearance in the exhibit. X-man liked looking at all of them, but he didn't want to sit down and read comics. He wanted to somehow play with them, but the exhibit is set up more for older children who want to sit on bean bags and indulge in Captain America for a while.

When we left, we let X-man pick out a toy from the store. He picked out a small version of the Space Shuttle Atlantis (the new exhibit which opened on March 23rd was all about Space and Star Wars: Clone Wars). Here he is carrying his prize past the Lego builder guys that were hard at work building that day. 
Overall, it was a lovely museum. It is large, so if you have bigger kids, you can definitely, definitely spend a whole day there. If you think you'd be willing to take the whole family back at least three times during the year, it's probably not a bad idea to look into a membership. I think as X-man gets older, we might consider it. 

The Children's Museum is a good reason to put Indy on your radar for a visit. I do suggest trying it out on a weekday if you have smaller children to see if it's less mobbed. A Saturday during spring break wasn't my first choice, but it was my first opportunity to get him there, so we went with it. It was doable, but I think he'd have more fun and gotten to see more things if it wasn't so busy.