Pizza Ranch held their annual summer meetings in the Wisconsin Dells this past week. This meant J & I got a vacation while Nate had to do work. It's a great location with so much to do. We brought our babysitter along as there were some things that I was also involved with. She was a great help and we like her a lot, we are so glad we took her along. I have a lot of pictures included in this post that I probably should have created a slide show for.
We met up with one of Nate's friends for supper and some mini golf. Jacob is pretty proud to be wearing his moose antlers and sitting next to the moose.
We had one afternoon of sunshine, even though it was on the chillier side we still opted for the outdoor waterpark. The water was surprisingly warm and Jacob loved the fountains.
Nate was able to join us for some waterpark time and of course Jacob loved it!
He liked going down the slides on his own too.
After the outdoor park we thought we would introduce him to the indoor park since he was having a good time and could see what it was like. Jacob has not been a huge indoor pool fan so we didn't know how this would go. It went well and couldn't get enough of the water, splashing, slides, fountains, the "crazy river"...etc.
One morning I decided to take Jacob to a wildlife park - the advertisement sounded interesting and it was toddler friendly - unlike most other attractions at the dells. Other than it being slightly overpriced - more than the Omaha zoo daily admission - Jacob got his money's worth - it was free for him :) We arrived just in time for an animal show where we saw this turtle, baby tigers, an opossum, some rodent from South America, a joey...then we wondered around the park, took a train ride, then found our way to the giraffes, zebra, and petting zoo area.
Here's some food giraffe! Except his hand is closed and giraffe can't see it.
Isn't that tongue disgusting?! A little creepy if you ask me.
Getting a little more comfortable with the idea.
Jacob just had a blast playing with the giraffes.
He even wanted to put the food on his hand...and he's still talking about it!
Checking out this end of the giraffe - and the giraffe getting down to Jacob's level. Cute!
So then we made our way to the petting zoo (like I said before...) but what we didn't realize is that we could feed them too and gave all of our food to the big bully giraffe - the huge one - he was all over the place. So there was no one else around this area and Jacob really wanted to feed these animals too. You couldn't just get food from a dispenser - it was clear on the other side of the park at the office - we weren't going back to get more food. However, there was scattered food on the ground from other people who dropped it while feeding the creatures. I showed J how to pick up some food from the ground and put it on the shovel for the animals to eat. We have one quick little learner on our hands and he was scooping up food like crazy. Too bad the shovel string wasn't long enough to reach the ground.
This little boy LOVES animals!
Jacob trying some sweet corn for the first time. It was our anniversary yesterday so we grilled steaks, had baked potatoes and sweet corn. It was delicious! Then later we took a trip to Le Mars for some ice cream! We celebrated as a family - Nate and I didn't get to go out alone as we had spent our budget for a babysitter already for the month. We couldn't get a free sitter to our home so we celebrated as a family! It was great! It was low cost - which was great because we ended up buying each other a wheel bearing for our anniversary - and will soon be purchasing another.
We've had a great harvest of strawberries to which Jacob has now taken a liking to!!!! Hope you all are having a great start to summer, thanks for checking in! Oh yeah, check out the video down below of Jacob feeding a giraffe.
