A great day!

Warning! This is a long post filled with lots of animals you have already seen. These picture's are more for Nathan, than anyone else, but if you want to check out some cool animals- keep scrolling.
What you can't tell in this picture, it that this hibiscus is the size of a dinner plate! It was GIANT.


This is a mystic illusion dahlia. The leaves for this flower are black. It was really pretty, one of my new favorite flowers.


The female elephants were really cool, because they were able to get so close to you. We were only about 5 feet from this one. It was neat to be so close to her.

The male elephants were behind steel ropes, obviously they are not as nice as the females.
The lady asked Nathan if he wanted to touch the "bearded lizard from Australia". Nathan barely touched it and then pulled away so quickly. I don't think he knew what to expect.

The giraffe's.

There was a model train exhibit at the zoo, and as I told you in the last post, Nathan LOVES trains. This is Nathan going "chugga chugga choo choo".
The children's petting zoo. Nathan liked being close and looking at the animals, but he learned for the lizard experience, that he doesn't want to touch them. But he sure is cute about it.

They have a really cool bird area. You can go inside and feed the birds. They will come up and sit on your hand and eat right out of it.


The black bear.

Nathan trying to feed the black bear his popcorn.

I think the polar bears was the best part! They were up and roaming around. The swimming bear was awesome. He just kept going back and forth past the window.




The zebra.
The cheetah.

The white tiger. If you look close, you can see it hiding behind the little bush right in the middle. Nathan was more impressed with an ant walking along the fence.

Cheese!
Turtle
Manatee


Nathan really likes snakes right now. He thought these snakes were so cool to look at.

The mighty (lazy) lion.
The sea eagle.


Nathan liked the rhino's. They had 4 different kinds of them. They were all the lazy kind if you ask me.

The gorilla!

The Cincinnati zoo was awesome! It is a very big zoo, with so many animals to see. Nathan can say lots of animals names and sounds, and it was fun to see him get so excited when he would see one of the animals he knows.
To end the great day, we went to a drive -in movie back in Lexington. It was a lot of fun. A GREAT DAY!

Iowa!

We drove from Kentucky to Iowa to visit Aunt Llew. It was a long drive, but it was way worth it. We did lots of fun stuff with her. We had to go to Aunt Llew's work one day and they had this very big bear to play with. I even got a small bear of my own to take home.
Aunt Llew took us to the spillway. It was pretty fun, but they had the splash zone all fenced off so we could only watch the water splash and crash. It was pretty fun.


We stopped at Fort Dodge on our way back so Nathan could see the airplane. We sat him up on the tank, but he did not like that one bit.

Union Park had a splash pool for kids to play in. At first Nathan was skeptical (like he usually is about new things) but he checked it out and ended up having a great time splashing. He even made some friends to play with (note- the boy in red shorts was not his friend).







We went to Union Park to ride the carousel. I thought Nathan would love it because of all of the different animals it had to ride like elephant's, a cat, zebra's and the panda bear, turns out it was more fun to look at than to actually ride it. Nathan started to cry before we even got on the bear. We tried to get him to ride it twice, and he didn't like it either time.
We went to the Farmer's Market at Valley Junction. It was lots of fun, we ate walking taco's for dinner that were yummy. Nathan loves train's! They had a caboose there so Nathan got to play on it.



Nathan had a lot of fun with Taft (Llew's roommate's dog). After Nate would play with Taft for a few minutes Nathan would say "all done" and "bye-bye puppy".

3rd & 4th of July

Our festivities kicked off Saturday morning when we went to the parade in Marietta. Nathan got his own flag to wave, he got to see fire trucks, police cars and horses among other things (like every single person and their entourage who is running for any type of office in the state of Georgia this fall). It was a lot of fun. After the parade we got snow cones! Then it was home for a nap and to wait for Aunt Bonnie's family.



Kennesaw does their fireworks on the 3rd, so we went to watch them. They have bands playing (this year it was a Bruce Springsteen tribute band), lots of jumpy things and slides for kids, food, popcorn and snow cones.

To bad the tree and phone poles were in the way of the pictures.
Aunt Bonnie, Uncle Russ, Jake, Kyler and Zoey came over to spend the weekend with us (it is so nice to have them close now). So they came to the fireworks with us. Unfortunately, Jake liked the Rigby fireworks better. We had lots of fun, and on the way home we even found a fun hill to roll down.
Nathan in his 4th of July church outfit. (I got the sweater vest for $.99, so it is ok that he only wears it this once.)

Sunday night we had our friends the Buttle's join us for our own firework show. We tried to keep the kids corralled in the back of the truck. That didn't last too long though.


Kyler playing with a sparkler.
We had lots of fun! I love 4th of July, and I can't wait until next year for more fun!