St. Louis Science Center

On Sunday, we headed to the St. Louis Science Center.  We are members, so we get free admission to the awesome Discovery Room and free IMAX tickets.  We had a great time exploring the museum, and the boys especially loved the musical instrument area, the dinosaurs, and the Discovery Room activities.  We watched the IMAX movie about Lemurs - Aaron's first theater movie and Connor's first IMAX.   The boys loved it, and we all learned about lemurs and Madagascar!  We ended the afternoon with concretes from the famous Ted Drewes for lunch!  Yummmm!!

In the Discovery Room, the boys liked trying out the hospital equipment...

Doing some drumming...

Playing with all of the marble games...

Chris attempted to make a magna-tile structure...

While the boys built marble tracks...

He did it!

When in St. Louis, you have to build an arch!

Using radar guns to track the speed of the cars on I-40 below the pedestrian walkway connecting the two sections of the Science Center.

Ted Drewes' concretes!!

St. Louis Zoo

Since it's only a five-hour drive from us, we headed to St. Louis for Labor Day weekend!  We arrived on Friday evening, just after dinner.  We spent all day Saturday at the enormous zoo in Forest Park. Our Memphis Zoo membership afforded us a huge discount on the St. Louis Zoo attractions, so we got to pet the sting rays, ride the train, and ride the carousel several times!  The zoo is huge, and we didn't make it to about half of the exhibits before we were too exhausted to walk any more.  The boys especially loved seeing the elephant family, including a "toddler" and a little baby; getting to serve as "guest conductors" on the train; and seeing lots of different animals in the Children's Zoo and Insect Zoo, two areas which we hadn't previously visited.

The boys learned all about cheetahs from this zookeeper.

The elephant family!

C loved petting this chinchilla.

Gotta take this picture every time we visit the STL zoo!

Petting the sharks, stingrays, and horseshoe crabs.

We love riding the carousel!

The coolest "guest conductors" on the train!

Lots of monkeys!

Aaron Writes His Name

Aaron has really gotten interested in learning about letters and numbers recently.  He can say the alphabet with about 80% accuracy, name almost all of the letters, and count to twelve.  He loves to read books and he can tell the stories of the Three Bears, Little Red Hen, and several others on his own.  He always wants to write his own name, without any help, and here's an example of his best work (on his speech homework):