Our Spring Break Stay-cation

For Spring Break this year, I planned lots of fun (and almost all free - yeah!) activities to do near our house. Monday - a play date with our friends Gloria and Eleanor. We had free passes to a local gymnastics open gym - which by the way I will never go back to as there was no adult employees ever and virtually no parent supervision either as most were simply chatting with each other - but ended with lunch at our house! Tuesday - Prairie Grass Nature Museum This is a free, one room museum run by a neighboring town's park district and we loved it!! There are two walls of life size animal and nature habitats and one in the middle of the room. There were several live animals: turtles, snakes, geckos, and rabbit for us to look. There are books and puzzles and baskets of animal and dinosaur stuffed animals and plastic figure. We saw real life chrysalis that will soon turn to butterflies. And there is always a craft and coloring pages. We made butterfly feeders and have the recipe for food. We'll be hanging those later in the summer. But I forgot to bring the camera so sadly, I do not have any pictures. Wednesday - Milwaukee County Zoo We have a family pass to the zoo and it is one of our favorite adventures! This time Gramma came with us!! Our first stop is always the Ape house where we spend lots of time, especially looking at the bonobos who have been known to run up and bang the glass and play peek-a-boo between two windows with us! We also look MJ and Mahul, a Mommy orangutan and her adopted child. Mahul came to the zoo right as we were starting the adoption process so their story has always had a special place in our hearts!

The boys spent a TON of time looking at animals before moving on to the next. Here they are looking at the camels:

And John at the ducks in the bird house, the room with all the free flying birds. He so got a kick out of looking up and seeing them fly:

Peacocks were another animal we spent lots of time looking at and John was too excited that he was able to get this close without the peacock walking away:

We discovered the best time to visit the Big Cat house, right before they eat! they were all awake and walking around. And anytime a zoo keeper walked by the exhibits, the animals would stop and watch where he/she was going. This is Ryan making a crazy face by who he calls Simba:

"Nola" looking right at Ryan:

And then at Gramma and John:

The two baby girl tiger cubs:

Our last stop was the gift store were Gramma had graciously offered to buy our special treat for the day. Here we are trying on masks to decide if we want that to be our treat.

Thursday - Volo Auto Museum

If you know the boys, you know their love for cars, especially John! They had actually taken a brochure for this museum, which is only a few minutes from our house, from a display at the zoo several weeks ago, and we thought this would be a fun thing to do over Spring Break.

Standing next to King Kong (they kind of know who he is because they have watched the part of the movie where King Kong and the dinosaur battle it out!);

Riding in the Flinstones car:

John standing next to a Cadillac, his absolute favorite kind of car. He lit up when ever we saw them at the museum:

Next to Doc Hudson:

Mommy loves Elvis:

Ryan loves jeeps:

Sitting in a real race car, you can just see Ryan's head:

and John's:

and Mommy's (notice my intense driving face!):

by a real United States Army helicopter:

riding some of the 50 cent kid rides:

This is a typical John face!

Friday - Lake County Discovery Museum

In honor of their recent accreditation by the American Association of Museums, this Lake County Discovery Museum offered a free day to celebrate!

Half the museum houses artifacts and displays about the history of Lake County. Very interesting for adults, not so much for little boys. But there are many things they can touch and play with throughout.

Ryan organizing Glen Rock pop bottles:

Sitting in a pretend boat:

playing with animal bones:

There is also a section where you can match the animal track puzzle pieces with the same animal track on a floor mat.

The other half of the museum is an art studio, changing displays, and a children's room. The children's room has pretend birds nests to build, bison and trees and prairie pieces to play with, bird costumes, a wigwam to build complete with Velcro birch bark pieces, and this:

a tree stump in which you put felt and plastic leaves in the top and they are blown out the side branch opening. My Mom also joined us for this day and it was a lot of fun!

Wow - can you believe we did all that in a week!