Family Vacation

Every other year, my family takes a family vacation together. This year everyone was pretty much out of vacation time (used it mostly for Erin and Ryan's wedding in April), so we decided to maximize our time and meet in St. Louis. This was great with us since it meant no long car trips with the boys! I wasn't sure if it would feel like vacation since it was literally just 15 minutes from our house, but it really did....no laundry, no making dinner, no cleaning the house, and getting to do all kinds of fun things with everyone - it was great!

We ate at the Spaghetti Factory Friday night (the boys got balloon swords which I regretted the rest of the weekend)and then spent some time on the go-karts at the Nascar Speedway Park. Saturday we went to Grant's Farm. The first thing we did was get milk bottles for the boys to feed the goats, but as soon as we got into the gate the goats started jumping on us and pulling on our clothes (one was literally eating my shorts!). This did not go over well with the boys who were crying and almost screaming to get out by this point. We decided that the other side of the fence was a much better place to feed those ravished goats!

As if that weren't enough, poor Ryan walked up to a llama that welcomed him by sneezing on his right shoulder - sorry Ryan, we had to laugh!

My sister, Erin, enjoys history so she always finds us a presidential museum, library, etc. for us to visit. This time it was the Ulysses S. Grant museum at Grant's Farm. Amber and I stayed back in the "kid-friendly" (not so much) part of the museum with the boys while everyone else watched the movie and headed out for the tour of the house. We found these cool costumes the Julia and Ulysses would have worn on their world travels, so we had some fun dressing up!

We also visited the Museum of Transportation - really cool place if your kids like trains! There are a lot of trains that you can board, tons of different ones to see, and even a trolley and a miniature train to ride. The train that Ryan is standing beside is the "Big Boy" - the largest steam engine. YOu can see that the wheels are even taller than Ryan!

Of course, we had ice cream one night (if you're with my family, you eat ice cream...it's a given), went to the pool, and some other things. It was just nice to hang out with everyone and have fun.