Brad and I are realizing our time here in Alabama is winding down and we will be moving soon. We had a few things we wanted to do while we were here and one of them was to visit Atlanta, GA. That said, we decided to take a weekend trip. We are saving his spring break time to go to Chattanooga, TN because it seems like there is a bit more for us to do there. We got a room at the Drury Inn. We love this chain. They are all suites so we always have 2 rooms so the boys can go to bed at their normal bed time and we can still stay up for a bit. The afternoon popcorn, free dinner from 5:30-7pm every night, a nice hot continental breakfast in the morning, and an indoor/outdoor pool and jacuzzi are all bonus. All that for just a little more than we would pay for a normal room at a regular hotel. OK. Anyway, I took the air mattress at the last minute and I'm so glad I did. They boys have never slept in the same bed and there was just 1 King bed in the bedroom and they didn't want to sleep together. However, rather than arguing about who got to sleep in the bed, they are argued about who got to sleep on the air mattress. I had to document this so I can show the boys later. We flipped a coin to see who got to sleep on it the first night (Eli won). We drove down on Friday afternoon and it took about 2.5 hrs. We checked in, got dinner, and then went to the pool.
On Saturday morning, we went to the outlets. This is the time of year when I can do the boys shopping for winter next year and usually can save an insane amount of money. Brad took the boys and they played for a little over an hour while I power shopped without the boys. They boys had a blast pushing each other in the stroller and playing hide-and-go-seek in the stores with daddy.
We have tasked Aiden with the big brother job of showing/helping Eli learn to put his socks on. It is so cute to watch them.
After a short nap on Saturday, we headed off to the Fernbank Natural History Museum. We got in free because we are members of the McWane Science Center so that was cool. We heard they had some cool dinosaur stuff so we headed down to it right away. The picture below is too cute. I just LOVE it. Here are my boys acting like dinosaurs. There is another one in the collage I made but it's slightly different.
Eli just cracks me up and I had to put this picture in the blog (and future scrapbook) because it's just so Eli. His goofiness can usually always make me smile. He melts my heart by saying, "I really love you mommy." Such a sweet boy with a good heart.
The boys are not yet in the stage to walk around and learn stuff about the displays yet. Aiden was just so excited to get to the dinosaurs he didn't want to stop and learn anything. I think he was also a little scared of the fossils and replicas as well. We tried to take a picture by one of the displays and Aiden wanted nothing to do with it (see upper right pic in the collage). They had this cool contraption there where you put balls in a bucket and use a pulley to bring it to the top of a structure. They had three pipes that you could then put the balls down and they would fall down to the first level. They cool thing was they had all these pieces of pvc pipe that had magnets on the back so you can direct how the balls will fall when they come out of the pipes. You can see Eli taking the balls up with the rope on the far right. Below that, you can see a series of pictures of Aiden building a path for the balls to fall. He did a great job but was a little obsessed with this exhibit. They had tons of stuff to do in this kids area and we spent about 1.5 hr there.
At the end of the day, we let the boys make their special pennies (see collage - bottom left). Brad and I even got a minute to snap a picture of us while the boys were playing.
I had to include the picture below I thought it was so cool that they had these pull-out walls with fossils in them. What a neat idea. They had tons of kid-friendly stuff at this place.
As we were leaving, we stopped out front to take a picture by the big dinosaurs.
Aiden starting coughing quite a bit on Saturday and of course, I didn't bring his inhaler. He got much worse on Saturday night and pretty much coughed the entire night. It was horrible. He was keeping everyone awake and it was double torture because we already lost an hour that night with daylight savings time. At about 4:30am he was coughing so bad that I'm sure the people next door were not able to sleep either. I turned on the shower and made it really hot and then took a pillow in there with Aiden and let him curl up in my arms for about 15 min to let the steam try and open him up. Needless to say, we were all exhausted on Sunday morning. We got up, packed up, and then headed off to the Aquarium. Olympic Centennial Park is across the street so we walked through it on the way to the aquarium. It was fun and pretty. Eli was tired and did not feel like walking so he rode in the stroller with his blanket on his head.
We were a little concerned about the quality of the aquarium based on the reviews I read. It was great that we were a little skeptical because it blew our socks off (it should have for how expensive it was)! It was pretty huge and very organized. These tanks very MASSIVE. There was a conveyer belt that slowly took us through the huge tank. I love this picture below!
They had lots of huge mantas. These things were bigger than I am although it's hard to see that from the picture. They were beautiful.
We also got to see some Beluga whales. They were very large and so playful. I could have sat there all day watching them play. The picture below shows all 3 of the whales.
I wanted to include the picture below so you can see how big these whales are. First of all, they would come right up to the glass and then swim along it. It was so neat. You can see some people standing there and get an idea of how big they were.
I love this picture in the upper left of the collage. I have another one with no hands in the way but I think the hands actually make the picture more awesome because you can see how big this fish was. By the way, that is Brad and Aidens hand. In the upper right you can see Brad being our tour guide and showing us all the fish to look for. The picture towards the bottom right cracks me up. They boys were sitting in this circle thing watching the fish and then Eli realized that he could actually go in the circle a bit. Both boys started trying to climb in. You can get a much better than actually being a fish inside the water.
The pictures at the very bottom were from the penguin exhibit which was way cool. It was very kid friendly and had a tunnel that went underneath the exhibit so the kids (and adults who wanted to crawl) could literally walk right by swimming penguins. Below you can see Brad and the boys in the tunnel. At the end of the tunnel, they have these tubes that stick up and actually let you really get a great view of the penguins. It was a genius building idea. The bottom two pictures in the collage are Brad and I holding up the boys to get a good look at the penguins.
The boys were getting very hungry and tired and we had pushed our limits with them so we decided to pack up and head home. It was about 1:30 when we got on the road and we were all exhausted from no sleep, loosing an hr for daylight savings, and walking around all morning. Aiden was so tired but said he wanted to lay down to sleep so he never fell asleep in the van. Eli was wide awake in the van and then fell asleep about 15 min away from home. It was so late by then that we didn't want him to sleep much longer because then he wouldn't go to sleep.
We were grateful for a smooth ride home and a fun family trip. We were so exhausted that we skipped out on a church function we bought tickets for. Fun memories. We have to make as many memories as we can because you never know how long you have to make more memories.
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