Birthday Train Ride!

To start Owen's (real) birthday celebration, we decided to take a quick drive down to Monticello Railway Museum for a train ride!  Even though Owen's first love isn't trains, I thoughts he'd enjoy this and we'd been talking it up for a few weeks.

You drive to a train station a few miles outside of town where the actual museum is located.  There is a little gift shop, train table, and lots of trains to look at.  One large one, you can walk through and look at all kinds of things in an "old fashioned" train.  Pretty neat!

 

of course, his favorite thing is the thing we have at home

going for a wagon "ride"

 

 

We bought our tickets and had some time to look around at all the things.  And then we boarded the train.  There was only one other family riding that day (score!) so we had a whole train car to ourselves.  Owen enjoyed the fact that the conductor actually came around and punched a hole in our tickets.  We rode about 4.5 miles to the other station in downtown Monticello.  It was the perfect length for our kids.  The temperature out was wonderful, but I would not recommend doing the train in the middle of summer.  It would be HOT! 

 

 

At the stop downtown, there are some more things to check out, like a working telegraph machine, lights, and bells to ring.  Of course, there is another train table which Owen didn't want to leave.  We stayed for about 15 minutes and then boarded the train to head back the other way.

 

In general, the kids acted as I thought they would.  Ellie adored the train. She said "choo choo" repeated and bounced up and down.  Owen had to be on one of our laps the whole time. 

 

 

 

After the train, we ate downtown Monticello at the yummy EL Toro there.  All in all, a great afternoon.  Happy early birthday buddy!

Peoria – Friday/Saturday afternoon

Whew, a little behind in the blogging world this week.  Let’s backtrack to last weekend.  The kids and I drove to Peoria for a packed but really fun weekend!  We arrived at my parents house around 3 on Friday afternoon and soon welcomed my brother, Philip, home.  We hadn’t seen him since Christmas, so it was great to see him and introduce him to his new niece.  Philip wanted Monical’s Pizza for dinner and then we all just hung out for the evening.

blurry but adorable

Saturday morning, my mom woke up early with Owen and gave me a glorious extra hour of sleep!  What would we do without moms? :)  Then we got ready to head to Wildlife Prairie Park!  This was a favorite activity of all the cousins while growing up.  Whenever we stayed with my grandparents, they took us here.  It’s a 2,000-acre zoological park that is supposed to be home to over 150 animals.  Hmm, we didn’t see nearly that many.  Maybe 7 species total.  I think this park was in it’s hay-day in the 80’s/90’s, but we still had a good time!

We walked some of the trails which kept us out of the rain that had started.  There was some really pretty forest and a few animals.

looking for the cougar

Ellie snuggled in and slept the whole time

yes, donkeys eat kleenex

rooster!

here piggy piggy

After we walked around most of the park, we headed back to the visitor center to meet up with my aunt, cousin, and grandma who were just driving into town!  This is pretty exciting stuff because we haven't seen them since my wedding 4 years ago!  They obviously haven't met my kiddos.  It was so wonderful to see them.  (More pictures of them in the next couple posts.)

petting a turtle

This was adorable.  Owen went around kissing all the animals in the stone animal garden:

 

the bison got close during their feeding time

time to ride the train!

he loved his first train ride!