National Zoo

Over the weekend we headed north to spend Saturday in Washington,DC. The kids loved driving past the pentagon and some of the monuments there. We started our day at the National Zoo. Since it's part of the Smithsonian, it's a free zoo (yahoo!) and it was really cool. We saw pandas, snakes, elephants, komodo dragons and all sorts of other zoo animals.



Because it's a free zoo, there is no main entrance-that was a little weird. There were several parking lots and they all had their own entrances-so we did have to remember which lot we started at. They had a spider display that was open. The kids were freaking out because there was nothing keeping the spiders IN (Bary was too :D) surprisingly, I was ok with that. Weird. Don't think that this pic was just an extreme close up.. the spider really was several inches long. That's right... inches.

We spent about 3 hours there and then headed to the DC Temple to meet up with Bary's grandparents and aunt and uncle.

The Reflections of Christ display at the visitors center was amazing. If you haven't seen it. check out

http://mabrystudios.typepad.com/reflections_of_christ/2008/03/reflections-sli.html

They are amazing photos.

We headed to lunch/dinner. We did Red Lobster and after we had eaten, Sierra and Marshall were done. I took them out for a walk and we stopped at the lobster tank at the front of the restaurant. The manager happened to be out and asked the kids if they wanted to pet a lobster. They did and she took one out and let them pet it as it crawled along the floor. Needless to say, Katelyn and Josh were bummed they missed out and I'm bummed I didn't take a picture. I'm trying to get better! After all were done eating, we said our goodbyes and happy birthday to Bary's grandma. We also came to understand why a 100 mile journey can take lots longer than 2 hours (hello DC traffic!)

This weekend we have our ward 'fall festival' so I'm hurrying to get costumes finished. I'm almost there so I think I'll make it! I'll post some pics over the weekend.