St. Louis, Missouri

This post is long overdue, but I still wanted to write about our wonderful experiences in St. Louis this last week.

The trip there was interesting and offered some great bonding time with me, my children, and my parents.  My parents aren't going to be around forever and I think that it's very important to spend as much quality time with them as possible.  My children will cherish those memories forever.

We somewhat surprised my brother and his wife when we arrived.  I had left a couple of messages, but apparently I left the messages on the wrong phone line.  Oops.  They knew we were coming within week, but just didn't know which day.  They were still ready for us and were great hosts.

We went to the St. Louis Science Center, which is a really fun free place to go.  They got to run a giant hamster wheel, build an arch just like the Gateway Arch, play with electronics, see dinosaurs, see real rocket ship capsules...there's too much to list. We finished up that day with a great dinner at a Japanese steak house, complete with the entertaining chef right at our table who cooked up wonderful food.  I forgot the camera there, so no pictures of Megan catching a shrimp in her mouth that the chef tossed at her, or the volcano onion that exploded with fire then "lava" (sauce) as it heated up on the grill.

 We went to The Butterfly House, a division of the St. Louis Botanical Gardens.  They have a wonderful green house that was full of thousands of butterflies and even a roach dome that the girls could climb inside.

No visit to St. Louis would be complete without a visit to the Gateway Arch.  It was the middle of the week and we had NO CROWDS!  That was a far cry better than the last time we went on a weekend and had to wait for hours to get in the Arch.  I love homeschooling and seeing sites during the week! 

 

The girls got in the Mississippi River, but just barely.  It wasn't very clean and I was afraid they would step on glass (which was all around).  We had a picnic on the Arch Mall and gazed at the Arch and the river.


On the way home we visited the Cahokia Indian Mounds in Illinois.  These are about one thousand years old and are the largest structures of their kind north of Mexico. 

It was an exhausting but rewarding week.