RJ’s Birthday

 

I made a blueberry oven baked French toast with blueberry syrup for RJ’s birthday breakfast.  Hunter had a baseball game that night.  We invited the Rowleys over for pie (RJ chose a chocolate raspberry pie) and presents. Amanda made him a cute card, the Rowleys gave him Twix and reeces.  I bought him much needed jeans for work and planned a road trip.

RJ is always talking about how fun road trips are and how much he enjoyed them as a kid.  He had told me more than once about the time his dad did a Star Trek themed trip.  We attempted to take him back to those blissful days of youth. 

Amanda created these awesome badges for everyone.  We each had a printout of our responsibilities.  I also made the kids consoles of candy that looked like control panels.  We made CD’s about space, had the Star Trek soundtrack and had a game of who could use the most famous Star Trek phrases the most.  Our favorite was “If you’re going to get nasty….” and “I’m a doctor not a _______________.”

We stopped at a park for drinks, snacks and exercise.

All the children napped.

We went swimming (as is always the favorite custom) when we got to the hotel.  Then we ate a microwave dinner and got some shut eye before our big day in Omaha.

We went to the temple then to the Winter Quarters visitors center.  We watched a short video about the saints and had a great time walking around the visitors center.  We got to dress up, load wagons in record time, see how the first odometer worked, see how immigrants slept on ships, and got to pull a hand cart.

The children tried pulling with different sized rocks under the wheel.  It was amazing to see how one little pebble caused so much resistance!

We headed to the Henry Doorly Omaha Zoo afterwards.  The zoo was huge!

We started at the aquarium.

We took a chairlift (like a ski lift) across 1/3 of the park.  It was nice to sit and cool to go right over top of the animals.  I liked that the enclosures were large and the giraffes could eat the leaves off the real trees.  They also had several animals of each specie.

We went to the 3D IMAX theater and watched a short video on animals of Africa.  It was fun to see the elephants walking towards us. The kids kept taking their glasses off to see if it was really coming out of the screen.

This orangutan wanted our apples.  He was reaching through the fence with his palm up just waiting for us to share.

I really liked the animals down under.  We walked around this dark swamp with huge alligators (one was albino), beavers and bats.

We finally left when the zoo closed and made our way to Iowa.  We stopped at a KOA (another one of RJ’s favorite childhood memories) and camped for the night.  The kids roasted hot dogs, marshmallows, caught fireflies, swam, played on a play ground and had a great time all around.

As I sit here looking at these pictures (one month later), I realize that sometimes the memory is even better than the actual event.