A Whirlwind Summer Part One

This summer has flown by!  We have done lots of fun things that I haven't had time to blog about (because we're so busy doing those fun things!) and I have some great pictures to share.

At the start of August I took the kids over to the Environmental Learning Center at Discovery Park here in Muscatine.  Amelia had been there once before when she was in preschool but Thomas had never been there.  They were so excited!

The ELC has a great permanent exhibit all about local wildlife and the hall is full of taxidermy animals and fish.  They also have a lot of live animals, amphibians, reptiles, etc.  They have a lot of great hands-on exhibits too like pelts of beavers, fox, wolves, and even a bison!  There are so many fun things to do there.

I was excited to take them there, but not so excited when I arrived and saw what the traveling exhibit was:

Nothing like a giant size display of a snake skeleton for kids to walk through and tons of full color photos everywhere to make my stomach feel queasy.

Barrels of fun, I tell you.  Anyone who knows me knows that this is possibly the worst exhibit for me to have to encounter.  The sight of a snake, any snake, in any capacity, is enough to make my body turn on itself.  The heart starts racing and the gag reflex starts to kick in, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to hyperventilate and vomit all at the same time.  It's awesome.  So a few quick prayers later and I was able to make it through this wretched exhibit with my dignity and my kids' opinions of me intact.

I know, Lydie-Bug, my face was doing the same thing all the way through the exhibit, especially when we got into the other room and I had to see those live snakes in the glass cases again.  I can deal as long as the damn things aren't moving.  As soon as they start to move around in there, it's all over.  It's like the time at our old house before the kids were born and I had to catch a mouse that had moved in and thought he had squatters rights to whatever was on the counter.  I set out a glue trap where I thought he would be caught and the first night he outwitted me by shoving it out of the way.  But the second night I put a big bottle of olive oil in front of the trap so he couldn't move it and he got stuck.  John went off to work the next morning and didn't bother to check the trap so when I came downstairs later, all bleary-eyed and ready to make my morning cup o' joe, I looked over and saw the baby mousie wiggling around on the little glue trap.  I let out a huge scream and called John and demanded that he come home IMMEDIATELY and take care of this terrible situation.  He politely refused and I was left to try and get the little bugger out of the kitchen.  I had to pick up the glue trap with the still moving mouse on it, throw it into a plastic bag, and throw it out on the deck in the freezing cold winter temps and hope that he froze to death or committed Hara-Kiri before John got home that afternoon and finally took care of the problem.  See, dead things don't scare me as much as live and moving things.  That wiggling mouse was ALMOST as terrifying as those wiggling snakes.  And don't even get me started on my parents' wise decision to take us to Reptile Gardens when I was like 7 years old.  I'm still scarred for life over that mistake.

But they don't just have terrifying snake exhibits at the ELC, they also have great stuff like these bald eagles and the big aquariums and all these other cool exhibits:

The Bald Eagle Display

They looked looking at slides under the special scope.

Checking out the huge catfish and many other fish and turtles.

Lots of informational displays about local wildlife as well as the pelts they are touching.

Checking out the pheasant hiding in the corn.

This display had wild turkey, swan, bobcat, baby fawn and many others.

Outside the ELC there are two huge ponds, one of which you can fish in.  They also had a bird display that I didn't get a picture of.  The bird display had a Great Horned Owl, a Screech Owl and a Red Tailed Hawk, all of which had a Gilligan's Island themed name.  The screech owl was called Ginger, the hawk was Skipper, and the horned owl was....Thurston Owl the Third.  Hilarious!  Amelia thought the horned owl looked like he was mad.

Personally, I just think they look kind of like Grumpy Cat.

 

Anyway, the kids had such a great time they actually asked to go back the next day.  Yippee, another day of choking back vomit to take them through the giant snake display.  Oh well, I'm glad they had such a great time.  In part two I'll talk about our trip to Lake MacBride on our first ever RV vacation.