City Museum St. Louis - Take 2

Ahhh....City Museum.  If you missed my previous post on City Museum you must read it here:  TAKE 1    It will explain this crazy place!!!!

These photos are still from the 1st floor (and some of the caves underneath in the basement).  In the above photo, the girls are looking at the HUGE fish and turtles in the tank!

The next photo is taken looking down one of the tunnels....Kennedy is on the left looking into the other side of the huge fish tank. The tile work in this place is stellar!   In the next shot, I stood by Kennedy and took a photo of Jeff coming into the tunnel!  She is screaming in excitement!

I am actually surprised this photo turned out!  We had gone through the tunnel and into some caves.  It was so dark in some of them you couldn't really see!  The girls' eyes are so big because of the camera flash!

Another underground tunnel.  There are so many interlinking stairs, slides and passageways that you can easily lose your children!

I wish I had more photos of the caves, but it was very dark and super twisty-turny!

City Museum St. Louis - Take 3 - The Toddler & The Bus

Ahhh....City Museum.  If you missed my previous posts on City Museum you must read them here:  TAKE 1   and here: TAKE 2.    It will explain this crazy place!!!!     This first shot is of my sweeties outside the museum. Look on the roof of the building....yes that is a school bus. More on that in a minute!

On the 3rd floor of the museum there is a Toddler Room.  Quinn and I spent about 20 minutes there while Jeff and Kennedy explored outside.  After 20 minutes she was over it.   :)

Cool steps, eh?!  Wish I knew where they found those fun cylinders!  These steps led to a tube slide, a ball pit and some climbing tunnels. 

Yeah baby!   BALL PIT!!!!!!

Luckily there is another ball pit outdoors....Quinn now LOVES them!  This one was about 3 feet off the floor. 

Happy face!

This photo was taken from the museum's website. It is the roof of the building - 11 stories up.  I think it is old because many things are missing, including the ferris wheel.  But I wanted you to see the school bus!  It hangs over the edge!

Going for a ride!!!!!

This s a total blur, but it is a photo taken out the door of the bus looking down to the parking lot.  (Yes, those are 2 airplanes in mid air. More on that another day!)

Bus Driver Kennedy!!!!  Looking out over the city!

Jeff got this shot from the parking lot....the underside of the bus!   Good times!!!!

City Museum St. Louis - Take 1

This was hands down the BEST stop on our trip to St. Louis!  The CITY MUSEUM is a kid's paradise - and there really aren't even words to describe it!   You can check out their website here: City Museum.  If you are ever in St. Louis, you absolutely MUST go.  Even if you are an adult!  You can easily spend an entire day there.  We went on Friday and they are open from 10am to midnight...no joke! And they held a wedding while we were there...such a cool place!

I will do my best to describe what I can.   Basically, it is an old 11-story building in the heart of downtown St. Louis which was once the International Shoe Company.  They have filled the first 3 floors with these incredible caves, treehouses, tunnels and things you can't describe.  You walk into a tunnel and can spend 30 minutes in there before you find a way to get out - and there are probably 20+ different routes to take once you are in that tunnel!  There are slides and ladders and tunnels everywhere.  This is one little excerpt from their website: 

Cassilly and his longtime crew of 20 artisans have constructed the museum from the very stuff of the city; and, as a result, it has urban roots deeper than any other institutions’. Reaching no farther than municipal borders for its reclaimed building materials, City Museum boasts features such as old chimneys, salvaged bridges, construction cranes, miles of tile, and even two abandoned planes!

The above picture is of Kennedy coming out of the bottom of a HUGE whale!  You can climb inside the whale and take different routes outside of it....here are my favorite people exploring the whale's innards!

The is under the whale's tale.  Jeff (in the blue shirt) and Kennedy (in the pigtails) are watching a huge drum of water fall into a pit!!

It is really impossible to get great photos in this place!  It is spectacular, but my photos don't do it justice.  You could spend so much time just looking at this room before you ever explored it!  The white stuff at the top of the photo is what is hanging from the ceiling on the main floor.  So I am up high taking this photo.  You can see part of an enormouse tree house here.  And the metal "cages" coming from the left of the picture??  See those? They are everywhere and it is how you get around in much of the museum.  Jeff and Kennedy are climbing through it!  See his blue shirt and khaki shorts?  Kennedy is in front of him with a green shirt.

Here is a close-up....see little Miss Quinn in there?!  She loved this place!! That girl has NO FEAR!

Another view near the ceiling....Kennedy!!!  She is climbing in that thing!!!  It is sooo small!  Some teenagers started climbing in it coming from the other direction.  I seriously thought they might get stuck!  Kennedy had to turn her body around and climb out the way she had come in!  

The next photo is part of the tree-house....I honestly can't even explain what you are looking at...other than it is a "tunnel" of tree limbs!  So cool!  The spaces are so cramped it was hard for me to get good pictures!

This is just one part of the museum!   I will share more later.  But I wanted to leave you with the museum's description of this floor.....

Perhaps one of the most visually stunning areas in the museum, the First Floor is part undersea immersion, part treehouse hideaway, part cave adventure, and all City Museum. Above you, visitors pinball through tunnels in the ceiling, giving them a birds-eye view of the beautiful and elaborate mosaic floor. Stroll through the life-sized bowhead whale and you may hear whale songs blending in with the crashing waves of water dumped out by the “Puking Pig”- a boiler tank perched atop an 1880’s fire pump that dumps water into the wave cave below. Fish fanciers will enjoy the 5000 gallon fish tank, filled with fish native to Missouri waters.(Look out for the 39lb catfish!) And when you think you’ve seen it all, dig deeper, because several underground passageways still await you, taking you under the floor, or work your way through the treehouse and up into the ceiling again. Can you find the pump room slide?

Swimming Lessons

Miss Kennedy took swimming lessons for the third summer!  She has been a fish since she was a baby so it is no surprise that she passed her level again this year!  

The skills she worked on this year were front stroke (freestyle), backstroke, elementary backstroke, scissor kick, and diving off the side.  The pool was so full of classes this session that Kennedy's class met in the 12 foot!  I was so proud of her for not being scared - who am I kidding?!  She is never scared of water!!

BACKSTROKE

DIVING!!!!

WATER SAFETY

I passed!!!  Onto Red Cross Level IV!!

Horses & Corn

I have no idea where she learned how to drink from her bowl.  -sigh-




 Quinn has been enjoying the play horses lately.  She rides on Kennedy's 'big' horse and says "Go Go Go!"  And we ride the stick horses around the house.  I say "Giddy-up" and she says "Gup Gup Gup!"

 Yum!   Corn on the cob!  Quinn really wanted to eat it - just like her big sister.  Kennedy LOVES sweet corn!  She is a great role model in showing Quinn that veggies are yummy.  Too bad Quinn doesn't really care.  She kept trying to eat the corn but once it was in her mouth she would make a disgusted face and spit it out.  Maybe some day she will eat vegetables.

First Summer Weekend!

Our first weekend of the summer was great fun!!  We have a tradition every Memorial Day weekend.  We attend Celebration at the Station and I look forward to it all Spring!  The Kansas City Symphony puts on a free concert outside of Union Station.  The audience sits on the hill overlooking Union Station.  We bring lots of food, blankets, chairs and games.  This year we brought some friends to experience it for their first time!  The children searched out their parents' electronic devices...no surprise. ;) 

Once the sun set, this children played with glow sticks and flashlights!  It was great watching the lights projected on Union Station and enjoying the KC skyline.   Eventually we turned out chairs around and watched the wonderful fireworks display over the WWI Memorial.  Quinn did NOT enjoy the fireworks at all, poor girl.  Too noisy!!  But she had done an amazing job all night considering how late she was up!  It was an awesome evening!

We also took our first dip in one of the neighborhood pools!  There had been quite a thunderstorm just a day before and the water was still chilly!  But Kennedy was still her normal fishy self - loving every minute in the water!  As I suspected, Quinn is going to be quite the handful at the pool this summer!  She thinks she can just run anywhere and go in the big pool at any time!  She will absolutely be wearing a flotation device all summer!  

Hooray for summer!!!

We can now cross off a few things from of Summer Bucket List!!!

#58: Go to a Free Concert

#38: Visit Multiple Pools (this was pool #1)

Grade ONE - Done!

Yup - here is proof she is done with first grade.  And to think that at the beginning of the year I didn't know how I would survive with her at school ALL DAY.  Yet, I did.  And she loved school - so much that as we walked out of the building she sniffled and said "I don't want to leave school."  I pray she always feels that way!!!

Last fall I created some forms for her to fill out to document who she was at the beginning of the year.  I then kept them hidden all school year.  You can read about it in THIS PAST POST.  We even have her hand and footprints!  The end of the year needed to be recorded as well, so I created a similar version to see how she has changed since the beginning of the year!  She LOVED doing them and comparing!!!

After school let out, Kennedy's 1st grade scrapbook club came over for our year end get together.  :)  So I didn't have her Summer Fun Box out yet!  Then she spent the night with her BFF that night...so the box was waiting for her when she returned the next day!

Her Summer Fun Box was filled with all sorts of fun things we will need to have a great time this summer!!  I also set out the framed list of Summer Fun from THIS PAST POST.  I think the box was a hit!

I can't wait to start sharing all our summer fun!!!!