Our First Saturday, and counting...

So, today was our first Saturday as a family in Saint Louis, and we headed down to Grant's Farm this afternoon. I realize we only have 10 or so Saturdays here, so I'm making a list of everything we'd like to fill them with to make sure we don't miss anything, and today was really a lot of fun! We'd been there years ago with Erick, but haven't been back since then.



The kids loved the elephant show, and to be honest, it's more elephant than I've ever seen at a zoo! The elephants here are the African variety, and this guy was pretty smart. You can see him posing in the background here, but he also showed us how he plays fetch, gives himself a bath, and showed us his ears and the bottoms of his feet, among other things. It was a lot of fun, and really interesting! I didn't know elephants had poor eyesight, or that they walked on their tip-toes.

Some of the other animals we saw in the tier park were the parrots, the bald eagles, and the camels and llamas. You can feed most of them, which was fun, and the kids even did great with the goats this time! Last time they terrified Erick, but each child handled their bottles of milk rather well this time. While Audrey didn't really touch them, she followed them around and did a lot of laughing and pointing. Whew!

Grant's Farm is owned by the Busch family here, so the stables house a number of horses and donkeys, their most famous residents being the clydesdale herd. This little donkey was born in February, and had the most beautiful long hair! The sign next to the stall said she hoped someday to be in a commercial, so we'll be watching for her career with Budweiser to take off!

Random girl, then Erick, Justin (holding Izzie), Jake (another intern) and Audrey taking in the clydesdale family here. The horses were beautiful, and the colts were really cute in a gangly sort of way. It was fun to walk through the carriage museum, and to learn how they were chosen and trained to become part of the official team. It's a pretty prestigious thing for a horse, I guess.

After we left the farm, we headed to Ted Drewe's, of course! Audrey enjoyed about half of hers, and Izzie even less than that, before they were promptly spilled. I figure with the portion sizes that was probably more than enough anyway for 4pm. We did icecream first, then dinner. :-)

Finally, upon returning home and walking around to find some dinner, we stumbled upon the Central West End's annual neighborhood festival, and had the good fortune of being able to try foods from a bunch of local restaurants all at once! We walked around the street vendors a little and enjoyed the live music, and on the way home the kids got free t-shirts from Chrysler! They have jimmy neutron on them, so the kiddos were thrilled. I'm sure they'll sleep in them tonight. All in all, a fun day. Hope yours was good as well!