Dead animals and Live ones!

Spring breaks should always go out in a bang, something to get you through those last two months of school until the summer gets here and life is just one big spring break.

So for our last day of spring break, we headed over to Waco and was pleasantly surprised at just how much there is to do there, we had a hard time choosing.  But in the end the animals won out, and to be fair to all animals we visited the dead one and the live ones (we are very equal opportunity around here).

this lady agreed to take our picture and then snapped it before saying anything to warn us, so here we are...

We stopped at the Mammoth exhibit that opened a few years ago, first and found it fascinating!  It is the only place in the world where you can see a herd of mammoth bones (or something like that).  They found the bones with the mommy mammoths surrounding their children to try and protect them for the flood/mud slide that killed them.  This made me happy to know that although extinct mammoths were really good mommies.

Jack was a little troubled by the whole mammoth experience though, it seemed to connect the dots in his head that things die, we will die someday, that seems scary.  We talked about how we will go to heaven when we die and it's ok to find the whole thing scary.  He's still got death and giant animals on the mind though.  A couple of days ago he asked me what used to be where our house was before there was a house and then if a giant dinosaur would knock our house down with his tail someday(??).

We really enjoyed the exhibit though and definitely recommend it should you find yourself over that way.  I will warn you it is small, it's just the dig site, but I suspect someday when they're able to raise the money they will add a museum.  Kylynn totally digged it (hah!) and asked the tour guide all kinds of questions.

We then ate lunch at the Health Shack, which I think is supposed to be quasi famous, and been in Waco for over 60 years, but we all gave it a 2 out of 5 stars, it was ok but really not good enough to be worth the calories.

Next it was time for the zoo.  The zoo on spring break, you say, have you lost your ever loving mind, indeed we have.  We parked at some industrial site a few miles away and hiked on over there (this made me feel better about the whole lunch thing).  Even crowded I do love Cameron Park zoo.  It is just big enough and has ever animal you could want to see.

I was a little troubled this visit by this lion who seemed very sad that no matter how loud he roared at that little girl she never did get scared.  Later we saw a leopard in a very small "cage" that had anxiety problems and couldn't stop pacing even for a moment.  I won't get into an animal rights debate but it did make me sad to see how obvious it is that these animals were never meant to be caged and it made me think about what our responsibility is for the way we care for animals (big thoughts I know!) :).

All that aside, we had a wonderful day, God went before us and prepared the way, we got done with the zoo exactly at closing time and every child was happy as pie.  We headed over to Jason's deli for dinner and I declared it the best salad place ever.  I'm sorry Souper Salad, but you are never going to make it if you cannot do better, you should have the best salad bars, it's in your name!

The kids crashed as we drove home and I got to have an hour and half un-interupted conversation with my love, are you kidding me!!  Talk about going out with a bang!  It was a spring break to remember for sure.

*no we did not have spring break again this week, yes I am a week late with this post