Celebrating Pete's Birthday

Before I start this post about our wonderful day, let me update you a bit on what we've been doing the past couple of days.  The kids loved being at the American Legion so much on Wed, that we helped out there again on Thursday.  And, instead of packing 500 lunches, we made 500 sandwiches!  There were 4 assembly lines going and the our clan was one of them.  It was so hilarious to hear them banter about their different jobs, always making sure that they were staying on target.  It was really cute and,again, they loved it!  Loved it even more than packing lunches. :-)  They also joined me on Friday when I had to teach.  Madie and Noah decided to spend that time playing their Ipods in the other room, but Livie was a great helper and saddled up to one of our new students and helped her with everything.  It was really cute!  She painted her hand for her handprint picture and tried to help her draw a flower.  I told her she should come with me every week!

But, anyway, that's all we did the past couple of days.  The town is still recovering and will be for many weeks to come.  If you are ever on FB, you can see some of the videos posted that show what our town is facing.  Kinda crazy, but we've definitely seen the best of people this week.  So much kindness and generosity.  It really has been an amazing thing to witness.  So, on to today's adventures:

Today is Pete's birthday!  It literally is today, on a Saturday, which opened up all kinds of opportunities if you ask me.  Pete really wanted to go hiking, but the road leading to Starved Rock was flooded and the debris left on the road is beyond description.  Easily a full foot of limbs, branches, and muck cover the road. So, I suggested the zoo and everyone thought that sounded fun!  First things first, though... presents!

We got him a snow cone machine with syrups and cups.  We can't WAIT to try that out!

The best part was Livie's painting.  She really wanted to paint something for him, so I got her a canvas and paints and let her do her thing.  This is a picture of him golfing.  The heart in the sky says "O+D for Olivia + Daddy. :-)  He loved it, of course.

We left early, so we could get there when it opened at 10am.  It was already a beautiful, sunny day.  They called for it to be in the 60s, but ended up being in the low 70s.  Seriously the best day for a zoo trip ever!

We decided to visit Stingray Bay before the crowds came and we got there at feeding time!  How fun is that?!

Look at all the stingrays that came our way!  They kids loved touching them as they swam by.

We bought a few cups of fish, so the kids could feed them.  Kind of freaking them out at first, but they thought it was pretty fun.  The stingrays would just come right up and suck them out of their hands.  One tried to eat Livie's finger. hehe

One of the reasons I suggested Brookfield is that they have a dinosaur exhibit this summer.  It just opened this month.  All the dinosaurs are animatronic, so they roar and move around.  Pretty cool.  Livie liked waving at them when they would start roaring.

You can kind of see the girls in front of this big feathered dinosaur.  Amazing to see how big they were!

I was less shocked at the size of this one and more amazed at the size of my son!  Can't believe my 10 yr old is almost as tall as I am.  He's literally an inch away!

We rounded a corner, when looking at the dinosaurs, and saw this broccoli-saurus.  You know I could not resist getting a photo of that!  If I had known it was there, I would've brought my can of spray paint and added the word "Weed" beside it.  Just so the kids weren't confused as to what it actually was, of course.

You can imagine how excited Livie was to see the T-Rex!

Love this picture of Pete and the kids.  Love this family of mine. :-)  We took this one by the big fountain in the center of the zoo.

We bought a special zookeeper card for each of us, which gives us free admission for the rest of the year and free one-time-use tickets to each attraction.  We saved a few for our next trip, but they really wanted to ride the carousel this time, so we hopped on.  Madie picked the wolf - her very favorite animal!

Noah picked the gorilla, because he wanted something that was related to a monkey - HIS favorite animal!

Livie just liked this one.  Of course, she didn't notice that it was beside the CICADA one!  Yeah.  That's Pete leaning on the cicada ride.  What the *blank* kind of carousel has a cicada?  And, it didn't just have one.  It had two!  So wrong.  So, so wrong.  And, did I mention gross?!

We saw tons of animals today, but I won't post all of them here.  Too many to share, but I had to share this picture of Madie on the wolf outside their exhibit.  This is her favorite animal, so she was super-excited to see several of them today.

As we were walking down to have lunch, Livie got especially tired, so Noah, being the great big brother that he is, carried her for a little while, even though he had a low blood sugar and was pretty darn tired himself.  What a good boy!

After we ate, we headed over to the dolphin show.  We haven't gone to this since the kids were little, so it was like seeing it for the first time.  They all loved it and really loved it when the dolphins would swim up and splash us.  They thought that was the best part!

Before we left, so we could get home and let Tater out after 8 hours!, we stopped at the gift shop to get a couple souvenirs.  When we saw the sign that say "Poo sold here", we knew we had the right place. ;-)  We had a great day and were so glad to celebrate Pete's birthday as a family in this special way.  Happy Birthday to the best husband and father I've ever known!  Love you, babe!