In Indy Indeed

The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis is a place where kids of all ages and places converge to learn and play. On this day, its visitors included my kids and their cousin Quintin. We battled the heat, traffic, congested parking garages, and long ticket lines to meet up with my brother and his family at the museum cafeteria, and then we were up against the boys’ naptimes as we navigated the many exhibits.

Olivia and Reed really enjoyed their brief but action-packed afternoon with Quintin, and they look forward to the time—now just a year away—when they’ll spend many more afternoons together. (Their cousin and his parents are relocating next summer to a community that’s less than an hour from where we live.)

Chair-Leaning Squad

Reed pepped up the crowd from his perch under the parasol, while Olivia chilled under the cover of her chair/umbrella apparatus, two of several gifts she and her brother got in the mail today from their East Coast grandmother.

Backs Up Against the Wall

Ronald Reagan once famously demanded, “Mr. Gorbachev, stand by this wall.” (Or something like that.)

The kids heeded the Big Gipper’s big directive along a wall separating a parking lot and a gift shop.

Science Faction

The “FETCH! with Ruff Ruffman” television program may have recently ended its five-year run on PBS, but it lives on in the memories of my children and at the FETCH!-sponsored science lab at our children’s museum. Our family’s fondness for “FETCH!” fetches back some ways. “FETCH!” for the uninitiated, is a science-education show disguised as a reality game show that’s hosted by a talking dog named Ruff Ruffman. It’s a brilliant show, and not in the British sense of “brilliant,” but rather in the non-British sense of it meaning—how should I say?—brilliant.

On this day, Ruff and the museum employees gave flight to our kids’ understanding of aerodynamic forces.

Foot's Loose

This is what you're handed (footed?) after your two-year-old gets a hold of your camera.

Two of a Kind

Here are two kind, one-of-a-kind kids who can kind of get under one another’s skin from time to time, but can kid kindly in kind in no time.

This Scene Looks Fishy

We came upon Jason, Trevor, and Khair fishing in the early morn, which leads me to ask, “Is it still called fishing if you get nary a nibble?” Perhaps the guys were baiting-their-hook-and-casting-and-repeating. Olivia tried her hand, but she quickly turned the pole back over when she heard that there were doughnuts back at the campground.

Go Take a Hike

For two of us, Devil’s Lake State Park in Wisconsin was our next destination. Olivia and I met up with Bob, his family, and several friends at a group campsite at the state park. We’d spent the previous four nights in a tent up in the Upper Peninsula, and so my thoughts when I’d originally confirmed our participation was, “What’s another two nights?” But after a night punctuated by the shrill, deathly sounds coming from the venue—how about that for a collective noun?—of turkey vultures occupying the grove next to our site, I’d modified that question to, “How in the hell are we going to make it through a second night?”

Fortunately and necessarily, the birds remained quiet as we took a group hike on the stone-stepped climbing trail up to the bluffs overlooking the lake. Later on in the day, we got a closer look at the lake when swimming in its warm waters.

Shipwreckx-N-Effect

Olivia and her friend Lucy took turns at the captain’s wheel of a glass-bottom boat on the clear waters of Lake Superior in Munising Bay. The girls and their families participated in a shipwreck tour, and they were happy to report that none of the sunken vessels were glass-bottom tour boats.

Picture(d) Perfect

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then Pictured Rock National Shoreline is worth the contents of the Oxford English Dictionary. And because I don’t want to let my attempts at wordplay distract from the star attractions, I’ll just let the pictures (and video) speak for themselves.

Camp Pain Mode

What would camping be without mosquitoes? More pleasant, for one. But as the old adage goes, “if you can’t beat them (or swat them), join together in getting the heck away from them.” Or something like that.

Our kids spent lunchtime enmeshed in mesh, so as to avoid the blood-drawn fate of those kids from Twilight.

Superior-ity Complex

This evening, we made our way to Whitefish Point (Google marker A on the map above) to see its lighthouse and walk its expansive, driftwood-strewn beach. Because this area is on the western edge of the Eastern Time Zone, the summer nights stay lighter much longer. The picture of Reed was taken around 9:45 p.m., and the one of Olivia in the cool waters of Lake Superior was snapped a half hour later.

All Four in One, and One for All

Okay, I lied: below is another of the quirky quadrumvirate.

Falls Sense of Security

Tahquamenon Falls comprise the Upper Falls and Lower Falls (not to mention a delightful restaurant/brewery). The above (upper?) pics are of us hanging out by the Upper Falls in the afternoon, and the lower ones—sorry, couldn’t resist—are those of the Lower Falls outdoor education program that Olivia and Lucy got their feet wet in this evening.

A Stroll(er) in the (State) Park

Reed and Liam popped a mobile squat on Mackinac Island (left) and at Tahquamenon Falls (below).

Lord of the (Butter)Flies

The questioning of our sanity is all the more justifiable this week than others: we have decided to spend four days camping in the hinterlands of the Upper Peninsula (technically, most of the U.P. is land of the hinter variety) with our young children. And that our good friends Phil and Maria—the parents of two kids the same ages as ours—agreed to join us either make (A) them the most tolerant people in the world, or (B) all of us bat-sh*t crazy. The answer is all of the above.

We survived the first night, and our kids were rewarded this morning with a fun and educational butterfly activity sponsored by an educator from Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources.

No-Cars-on-the-Road Island

Mackinac Island is famous for its fudge, Grand Hotel (featured in the 1980 film “Somewhere in Time” starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour), and disallowance of motorized vehicles. Although the place is often overrun by tourists like us, it retains a magic—a carefully crafted one—that’s not unlike the kind one experiences at Disney. And it’s even more magical to spend island time with friends and family, which is exactly what we did on this fine July day.