Things to Do in Brandon

Sprawling across an indoor arena, Pump It Up's giant inflatables beckon kids to slide and bounce during private parties and open play. Technicolor bouncy castles send their inhabitants soaring, obstacle courses foster good-spirited competition, and ceiling-to-floor slides let sock-clad kiddies pretend they're escaping a giant gumball machine. Occasionally, Pump it Up's staff dims the lights and turns up the music to transform their facility into a glow-in-the-dark party catered to tweens and teens.

Pump It Up's staff supervises the arena during parties, giving parents time to relax and play patty cake uninterrupted. They can also help customers design personalized parties inside a private room with options such as pizza, drinks, goodie bags, balloons, and ice cream.

As youngsters, Charles and Talamieka Brice experienced the world through drawing. While his life revolved around comic heroes such as Batman and The Hulk, hers hinged on doodling family members and teachers rather than biting their likenesses out of hunks of cheese. When the pair met in art classes at Jackson State University, what began as a friendly rivalry quickly transformed into a rewarding romantic and artistic partnership. Now married, the award-winning illustrators, photographers, and graphic designers use their talent to craft work for individuals and corporations equally adeptly. They capture striking images of families, kids, and weddings from behind the lens, which they preserve as prints, images burned onto discs, or customized hand-drawn portraits. Their skills extend to pet portraits, watercolor and oil paintings, and sculpture. Additionally, their graphic designs have professionalized the look of corporate brochures, logos, and catalogs.

Throughout the week, Fannin Lanes provides classic entertainment opportunities for bowlers of all ages with 24 tenpin runways and a stocked video arcade. The alley is also home to a full sports bar, which serves dishes such as santa ae egg rolls, fried dill pickles, potato skins, and mexican okra. Craft beer flows from the bar's 40 taps so guests can wet their whistles before refereeing games. Leagues are available seasonally and the alley pro shop houses a stockpile of balls that may be custom-drilled.

Inside the brightly-lit confines of Fat Cat Ceramics, shelves brim with bare-bisque pieces in the form of plates, mugs, and bowls. Visitors wield non-toxic, lead-free glazes and paints, embellishing items with designs such as flowers, abstract squiggles, or a squirrel's handprint before accommodating staff members fire the pieces, readying them for everyday use. Not just a paint-your-own pottery studio, Fat Cat Ceramics offers specialty sessions such as Clay Day, where participants learn to make their own pottery pieces, and summer camps, where campers delve into daylong or weeklong projects such as creating a mosaic plaque, building flower pots out of clay coils, and making clay jars to store one’s nosehairs.

After selling a successful mosaic shop in her native Texas, artist Wanda Hendrix followed her daughter's family to Mississippi, where she and her husband opened The Mosaic Shop in 2006. One relocation and six years later, the large and colorful studio's walls burst with more than 150 wooden shapes—from simple trays to elaborate figurines—ready to be converted into colorful mosaics. Each of the work tables share a common midsection, where glittering piles of glass stretch from end to end in a variety of shapes and colors. Visitors glue these prismatic shards to their forms before filling in crevices with grout, the same way park rangers finally made the Grand Canyon passable for golf carts. The Mosaic Shop also hosts parties for groups of anywhere from 5 to 50 guests.

The Russell C. Davis Planetarium transports patrons from the bottom of the ocean to the farthest reaches of the galaxy in a massive domed theater. Shows often replicate the night sky on a hemispheric screen, exploring nearby stars and planets as they appeared when viewed from different locations on Earth at various points in history. School groups can tour the facility with a program guide to learn about astronomy, physical science, and the likelihood of their ancestors being exceptionally good-looking space aliens. Large-format films portray the vast extremes of land and sea in natural-science documentaries, whereas occasional laser-light concerts pair contemporary tunes with vibrant beams of light and color.