The start of our new adventure-Part 3- Omaha

Uncle Brian, Aunt Sara, Natalie, Alyssa, and Ethan, with a partial Conner behind them looking at the list of people.  Another warning, this post is going to be ridiculously long.  Feel free to skim....I'm documenting this for us as a family as well and we want to remember all the details.  You've been warned.  :-)

Family shot that a another group graciously took of us.

 Temple grounds.

The above pictures are of the temple grounds and my adorable niece Emelia.  She was too much fun!  My kids adore this girl!  Us walking to the visitors center for a self-guided tour:

Once we got to the visitors center we got to see a TON of stuff.  Beautiful artwork, life-size wagons and homes, and tools and clothing that was or would be worn during that time.  It was such a neat experience!  Here are some fun pictures from that:

Ethan and Daddy, (who incidentally is the better/preferred parent for this sweet boy).

Inside a cabin.  Ethan didn't like this cabin because he said it was too dark and too small.....small is an understatement.  It was tiny.  I can't imagine living in something so small and primitive.

The view looking up, some sort of loft.

The mile marker wheel.  This is how they kept track of how far they had gone.  A certain amount of rotations was one mile....tedious way to keep track!

A pair of oxen that would have pulled a wagon.

The wagon.

Ethan trying to push a handcart and Conner's excited happy dance while watching him try.

Conner trying to push  the handcart.  They also had a section where the kids could dress up like pioneers and a bunk bed type thing that they could sit/lay in that was what the pioneers would sleep in when they came over on boats.  They loved the dress up part and the climbing up onto the bunk bed part!

Emelia wanted to play dress-up too!!

The artwork room:

It was a really neat experience and my kids absolutely LOVED it!  We went home and had dinner and the kids played in the basement where Brian had set up a tent for the kids to sleep.  The loved that too!  The next day we had planned to go to the zoo.  I had heard about the zoo in Omaha from Brian and Sara and from my family who had been previously but I was still unprepared for the size, scope, and just plain fantastic experience it would be!!  That zoo is something else!  The alligators/crocodiles or whatever they were, were underneath the desert set up that they had.  You walked along a path, it was a bit dark where the crocs were and just enough light so you could see where they were....Everything was so neat!  The way it's set up, it's a very family friendly/zoo goer friendly place!!  Did I mention it's huge?!  Here are some pictures of the zoo experience, (warning:  there are TONS of pics of this part and many times the backs of the kids heads were all I could get from them, feel free to skip some if you'd like.)  I'll try to keep them categorized, to start off with is the desert/reptile building/exhibit.  It's a giant dome that looks like this:

You follow the path that winds around in the middle and outside the exhibit and the animals are like you see, close and behind a net.  You can see EVERYTHING up close.  My kids were in heaven.  After a while on this path it starts to go down into a building, into an elevator and down into this:

Yes, those are bats.  They are yucky and smelly.  These were just regular old bats but later on you'll see vampire bats...those things.....well, you'll see.  This path keeps going until you get to this:

You get the idea.  It even had beavers and an otter I think.  It was a path but it had rails like the one you see above and netting.  It was AWESOME!  I'm debating but for me this might have been my favorite exhibit because of the effect.  It was dark except those eyes reflecting back at you!  Natalie of course explained how that was happening with their eyes and why they did that....my little encyclopedia!  When we finished with this building we went to the next one.  The monkeys/orangutangs/gorillas etc.  It was so neat.  While we were standing there a couple of them reached their hands thru the netting and put their hands out palm up.  they wanted some of the food that you aren't supposed to feed the animals.  One lady or man threw some dried fruit and they climbed down the fence and got it.  Came back up and begged for more.  It was fantastic!!!  Here are some pics:

Isn't that adorable?!  I LOVED it.  You can't see it but Alyssa was jumping up and down and dancing she was so excited.  Here are some more from this part of the epic zoo adventure:

She did NOT want her picture taken and I was making her, this was the face she gave me...reminds me of her Dad just a bit....  ;-)

Emelia was shocked at Natalie's behavior!!  Haha!!  No she wasn't, she was looking at the above ginormous animals and looking cute while doing it!!

After we saw the gorillas etc.  we went to the Aviary.  Alyssa's FAVE!  Well, I can't say it was her very favorite but she does LOVE birds.  She tries to chase them at school or at home hoping to catch one.  She enjoyed the aviary, I enjoyed not getting pooped on in the aviary! 

The aviary was actually pretty neat, the third to last picture above was my favorite part of the aviary.  This tree, and the one right next to it was literally chalk full of nests.   Some had babies and some just eggs but there had to be at somewhere between 20-30 nests in each tree.  It was so fun!  From there we had lunch that Aunt Sara made and was yummy!    Then we went to see the fish.  The fish were Coy fish and were kind of part of the aviary but not really, I guess they were just connected by the river running thru both exhibits.  You could even feed the fish.  When food dropped it looked like this:

Pretty neat huh?  We stood on a bridge to feed them and there was an island of small monkeys across the way that you could see and throw marshmallows to.  No I did not throw any marshmallows.

 Why pay to feed the fish when you can pick up stuff people drop and throw it down to the fish for free?!  You can't see it very well in the above picture but there were a couple of ducks swimming on top of the fish like there wasn't any fish there. And speaking of fish, after that we went to the aquarium also one of my FAVES!!

We were in a tunnel so some of this was directly above our head and some to the side but it was unreal!  so neat to watch the sharks, the giant turtle which had to be half my size.  Also we saw other sea creatures like these:

 The Jellyfish were mesmerizing.  I LOVED watching them.  I think they are so neat!  I of course, would not want to swim with them but watching them where I know I'm safe.....awesome!  The last one up there is upside down jellyfish.  They have a symbiotic relationship with the rock that they are on.  There was also this ugly creature that had a shrimp in it's mouth:

Sara was telling us that the eel and the shrimp have a symbiotic relationship.  The shrimp cleans the eels mouth and the eel doesn't eat it.....It's super ugly, kinda like a train wreck, you just keep staring....
And then there were these:

And these:

That last one is an octopus that is up in the corner of the aquarium above me.  Pretty neat.  Natalie loved it because in her 4th grade class before we left her teacher, Mr. Gabler, a brilliant teacher, dissected a squid.  Natalie will never forget it and can name all the parts, where they are and what they do.  She is my walking encyclopedia.  Love that girl!  Anyway, next we went to the jungle.  I may have gotten where we went when in the wrong order but I guess that's not HUGELY important.  I'm going to post this because it's getting really long and do a separate one on the jungle and the Butterfly building on another one.  Yeah, there are still 2 buildings to go.  When I say we had fun.........we REALLY did and we packed a lot into a pretty short period of time.