Have I missed one (or several)? Drop a comment or a @reply on twitter and I’ll do a follow-up with input from everyone.
We’re back at The Indianapolis Children’s Museum again! The focus of this trip was on their new “Incredible Costumes” exhibit. Since our family are such fans of Movies and TV (and Halloween, heh), it was a natural attraction for us.
We were immediately greeted by their newest addition to the entrance area, Bumblebee from the Transformers movies:
We started the day where we start all our TCM visits… ScienceWorks (it’s a boy thing). Sam found the Chimpmunk vest (chipmunk stripe not visible in the below photo, but it’s there I assure you) and gave it a test with his best “chipmunk face”.
The usual second stop is the carousel.. today was no exception, especially given both boys had friends with them. Sam had his friends Carson and Addison(not pictured)…
while our Carson had his buddies Logan and Nathan.
Here’s a good one of the older boys goofin on the steps:
Why were we here again? Oh yea! The “Incredible Costumes” exhibit!!! The children’s play area in here was pretty cool; it provided a costume area complete with dressing room mirrors, a stage area with interchangeable backgrounds and reversible props, and a director/audience area. Here’s Logan and Carson apparently filming a horror flick.
Later in the costume area practicing an action scene.
There was also an area on the other side of the exhibit that had videos playing but I didn’t get to check it out. The rest of the space had cases with all kinds of cool costumes in them… here are a couple.
We rounded out our visit with a stop in Dinosphere and All Aboard (Trains)…
As our friends were preparing to leave, Sam and I found the Princess & the Frog set outside the theater. Sam gave equal time to both roles.
Another fun day spent exploring and learning… Thanks Children’s Museum! To browse my full gallery from our trip click away below!
Full Gallery
With Papa in town for the kid’s Spring Break, I decided to take Friday off to take them all somewhere fun… we decided on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Hall of Fame Museum. They had recent changed over the cars on the display to show only those that have won the Indy 500 (on their main showroom floor). Everyone really enjoyed looking at all the cars, new and old. We were treated to a Track Tour as well, which I had never done. It was pretty cool and by the time we finished our tour the guy over the speaker said, “We would have just been lapped by an IndyCar for the 15th or 16th time”… Whoa!
Here are some of my favorite pics… full gallery link available at the bottom.
This past weekend we made it out to the Indianapolis Convention Center for Brickworld: Indy… it was 18,000 sqft of Lego displays/vendors/activities. Our good friends the Rose’s invited us to join them, the mom’s both opted out of the event. So it was two dads and four boys off for a day of Lego Mania.
Much of the signage was either made with Legos or had a Lego creation next to them… this extended to name tags on staff (I wish I had gotten a good pic of the name tags).
In the first area as we arrived was an area where different building activities were going on. There was mural building, a miniature golf hole, little kid legos on the floor, and where our group rushed, the enormous table of gray bricks. Kids (and adults) were challenged to build anything they wanted with the simplest of Legos.
In the next (much larger) area were the displays… grand scale creations, with amazing attention to details.
The Lucas Oil Stadium display had motorized sliding window and doors…
My favorite “scene” was this siege on a castle…
This is the one image that truly summed up the whole experience for the kids.
We had an awesome time and at the end we toured some of the vendor tables that lined the outer wall of the display area and proceeded to spend way more money than we planned… so many little custom items to make your Lego creations come alive for you. This is on our watch-list to make sure we get back to again next year.
One year ago today I earned my Newbie Badge in Foursquare. It’s been an interesting year all around and I’m glad I have been using Foursquare so I can look back and say “Alright, I did get off my butt and do SOMETHING!”
I want to thank AboutFoursquare for making an awesome infographic that inspired me to think about making one of my own. They were even awesome enough to break down how they did it. Mine is a little rougher around the edges but I’m pretty pleased with the result.
I was happy to see three of my favorite local businesses that I mention on Twitter show up in my most frequented list. Scotty’s Brewhouse, The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, and West Coast Tacos are great venues (one of them is on wheels!) to frequent. I’ll have to get that ‘other’ venue replaced this next year with something local.
Thanks to everyone that has been a part of my life these last 365 days!!
Here are some highlights from Chance’s First Birthday party! Full album link at the bottom.
Here’s a few snapshots from the icestorm that stopped by…
Daytime:
Nighttime:
Hope the joy of the season is filling your heart and home. I haven’t posted the third update I promised yet, but the holiday really snuck up on me. Look for that third update soon, hopefully with some nice Christmas photos.
Closing today’s post with a memorial… to my Grandpa, C-Pop. He passed today and he’ll be greatly missed. Love you Grandpa!
And here’s our November volume of updates…
We started off the month getting some family portraits together, it had been quite some time since we had a nice picture of the four of us.
Carson’s first grade portraits came back and they look really great. He’s doing so well in school too.
Someone slammed into the back of our Van and the fled the scene. Jenni was the only one in the van and she was not injured. 
I got a new camera body that added some much needed features, one of which being video. Additionally I added a lens that lets me take photos with much less light.
The boys helped Nanny make an Apple Pie! I think they had more fun eating it.
My cousin Becky came to visit us for a couple days… it was really great seeing her. One night we had dinner with the whole family, her, and my other cousin Keli(and her kids).
Our dear friend, Alyssia, from Nebraska was in town for a teacher’s conference, so we treated her to a trip to the Indianapolis Zoo. 
Another month, another trip to the Indianapolis Children’s Museum. This time we went with my sister and her boys. We went to the planetarium show and spent a lot of time in the DinoSphere. I took a great video of Sam enjoying a Goldberg Machine. 
Sam had his final follow-up for his surgery and everything looks great according to the doctor. The earliest we would need to go back again would be in a year. Before the appointment Sam, Dad, and I had lunch at an Indy staple… Mug -n- Bun. Sam loves their hotdogs and french fries.
Carson and his buddy Riley love playing together. I grabbed the flash and tried to get some action shots of them playing Wii.
“Excuse me, Miss, but there’s something peeking out of your new bag.”
And we finish up November with our trip to Nebraska to visit with family and friends for Thanksgiving. It was a great trip like always. Lots and lots of photos and lots of videos.
The famous sleep-eater:
Closing up with a couple artsy things I did in November:
I’m going to write 3 blog posts today… this one to catch up from September to the end of October, a second one to cover November (that I’ll publish tomorrow or Thursday), and the third one to get you from November to where we are now. To simplify the updates, I’m going to limit them to one flash slideshow of one album the rest of the albums will all be accessible via thumbnail links after each snippet of text.
It’s been a crazy couple of months with so many little side projects and things going on. The blog seems to be the first thing that I skip out on if things get tight… so if you suffer another drought here then you should follow me on Twitter/Facebook or my photo website as those I tend to be able to keep top of mind things rolling on.
So, where were we… oh yes, September dissolving into October:
The usual goofing around continues, of course,
The Buddies
Samuel turns TWO!
Related Sam is Two albums:
B-Day Lunch 
B-Day Dinner 
B-Day Party
The kids favorite museum in the world makes an appearance in our photo journey. The Indianapolis Children’s Museum open it’s new Fly with Me to Egypt exhibit so we went to check it out.
Sam made a new friend, BokBok. BokbBok is a little stuffed animal bird that “cheeps” if you squeeze him. Sam played with him most of the day, most of that time in his Little People playset. We it came time for bed Sam wanted BokBok to join him… so he brushed the bird’s “teeth” and then tucked him into bed next to him.
A day Sam was waiting impatiently for finally came on the 7th. He got his splint off! We got some pictures of the check-up visit with the Doctor that did his surgery. Sam was so happy to get that splint off his arm. He was quick to get back to playing with his trains.
We made our annual pilgrimage to the Pumpkin Patch to find a pumpkin for everyone to make their own for Halloween. This year we went to Beasley’s and it was a great trip. We were joined by my parents, my sister, and her boys.
The Indiana vs. Illinois Football game in Bloomington is our next stop on the trip through October. Myself, Carson, my dad, a co-worker and his son braved the cold to take in a Big Ten football game at the newly renovated stadium. It was homecoming and IU came up big with a win. The boys favorite part had to have been the mini-field on the south end of the stadium that was for kids to run and play on.
Our haunted house trip is always a highlight for our whole family… next year we may have to make two trips, one for Carson to do the “scary” side and one for Sam to do our normal “friendly” trip. We invited one of Carson’s buddies from the neighborhood, Riley. The boys all had a great time.
Pumpkin carving, scary decorations, great costumes, and trick or treating… just a few of the boys favorite Autumn things. It all came to it’s peak on Halloween night.
That brings October to a close. Tune in tomorrow for our November update! To close, here are a couple of artsy pieces I did in October.
