A Weekend in St. Louis

We went to St. Louis on Saturday morning with my parents. Despite the horrible traffic, we made it to the zoo by 1 p.m.. My friend from high school met us at the zoo with her 2 kids, and we had a good time. She lives in St. Louis, so it was nice to be there with someone who knew her way around really well. Gracie opted to not ride an animal on the carousel...she has always felt safer on the benches or on the animals that don't go up and down. This carousel didn't have any animals that stood still, so I wasn't surprised when she suggested we ride the bench.
Ella was so good at the zoo. She didn't sleep at all, but enjoyed being outdoors.
Gracie would never say what her favorite animal was, but I think it was the penguins. She kept wanting to go back and see them again.
Gracie with two friendly penguins that allowed us a close-up look. They were so cute.

This is Gracie with Lydia. She is one of my friend's kids. They had a good time admiring the animals together. They played an unofficial game of "Come here. Look what I see." It kept them busy since there was so much to see.
Gracie thought the alligators were scary, but she wanted her picture with them anyway.
There was no fear present when Gracie stood by the monstrous boa constrictor. Grandpa wasn't anywhere nearby during this photo. He kept his eyes straight ahead while we were in the snake areas.

My favorite animal was a toss-up between the baby lion cubs (one of which is in this shot),
or these two monkeys who were hugging/snuggling. They never moved while we were watching them. One of the monkeys just sat there holding the other monkey. It looked like they were sad about something, but they were so sweet.

After the zoo we went to Uncle Dana's house. He took us to Fritz's for supper. It was a really neat place where you can watch them bottling root beer while you wait.

After dinner Brent and I left the girls in the capable hands of Uncle Dana and my parents, and we headed to the Fox Theatre. We were so looking forward to this night, and it was just as fun as we expected.
Jim Gaffigan is one of our favorite comedians, and he was doing a show at the Fox Theatre. His tour is called The Sexy Tour, but there was nothing crude about his jokes. He said he called it the sexy tour because he's a tall, very pale man with a big head...anything but sexy. Anyway, Brent laughed so hard in the first 10 minutes that he started to have an asthma attack and had to make himself calm down and quit laughing so much. Other than that, it was a great time. If you are familiar with Jim Gaffigan you will know his bacon and Hot Pocket routines, and he did both, so we had a good time laughing at those familiar jokes.

Sunday we got up and went to Dana's church. It was a very impressive church building and the music was really pretty. We had a small incident with Ella in the nursery which resulted in me taking her out of the nursery and keeping her with me, but other than that it was a nice morning. We went to lunch with my brother and then started the trek back to Macon. It was a fun weekend, but we were glad to get home. The mountain of laundry wasn't so much fun to come home to though!