Thomas Birthday

Today Thomas turned 4 years old. He is my sunshine sweetheart, with curly hair and a smile that makes me happy when skies are gray!

Oh the curls!

We spent a couple hours this morning at the Hogle Zoo. It turned out to be a great day to go to the zoo, because right now they're featuring "Zoo-rassic Park" - dinosaurs all over! We rode the train and saw several small dinosaurs in addition to the live animals, and Zaylee and Thomas were pretty excited about it. There were also several animatronic dinosaurs situated throughout the zoo that the kids were able to look at.

There was also a dinosaur dig - a great big sandbox with dinosaur fossils hidden in it for kids to dig and find. That was definitely popular with Zaylee and Thomas.

There was a small display in one of the buildings that featured real fossils and dinosaur paraphernalia. A hadrasaur footprint as big as Thomas, a giant dinosaur femur, an allosaurus fossil, a game to guess whether an object is a rock or a bone (I think they were all bones, though most looked like ordinary rocks).

 

Of course, there was the always favorite big elephant. Thomas is still scared of it, so he stayed away. But Zaylee ran right up and had some fun with it.

Hmm, maybe a little too much fun...

And just to prove that Audrey and I were there too, here's a picture of the two of us (p.s. I love my mei tai, I have been able to use for all three kids at a variety of ages, it's awesome).

After leaving the zoo (Thomas was NOT happy to leave, he wanted to stay at the zoo all day long!) we stopped by Smith's and got some freezer pizzas, a cake, and a carton of ice cream. I would have made a cake but we just got home from Idaho yesterday, were at the zoo this morning, and Jeff has work this evening so there was no time to make a cake. That's okay, Thomas got to choose a fun, colorful cake from the bakery and we were all happy with it.

Here's the traditional singing of the birthday song:

We enjoyed the cake and ice cream for a little while, but as soon as we gave Thomas his gift, he and Zaylee pretty much forgot about their cake and ice cream because the present was too much fun to pay attention to anything else! We got him a Thomas the Train set, with train tracks, a battery-powered Thomas engine, a freight car, and a little factory where you can drop a load of chocolate into the freight car. Way too much fun!

Overall it's been a good day.