Jacob's Baby Blessing

Dad and Daniel visited this weekend for Jacob's baby blessing! Daniel will be leaving in July to his mission in the Ukraine so it was really special for him to be there and also participate in the baby blessing. We went to the zoo with them on Saturday on one of the hottest days of the year! Jacob kept our map :-) and he slept the whole time-an angel baby! (of course that meant he woke up more often that night but it wasn't bad)

This zoo is about an hour away in the middle of nowhere so there is a lot of acreage for the animals. The NC Zoo also has a lot of these metal statues that the kids loved to play with.

One of the most exciting parts of the zoo trip was the CAROUSEL! Nicole and Michael loved it and went three times each-Dad thought Michael was looking a little dizzy after a bit so he made sure to hand him off to Jim as soon as he was done :-) Jim and Daniel said they got dizzy too.

Nicole picked out a gorilla to ride and Michael is on a rhino. Michael didn't say a word, just looked all around in awe.

This zoo has 5 miles of walking trails and was pretty exhausting. We only saw half of the zoo in three hours!

Michael was three hours past naptime at this point and was such a trooper!

This is when Michael was too dizzy and Jim took Nicole on the alligator! I tried getting Jim to ride on one of the animals, but they wouldn't let him.

We went out to dinner that night and then out for ice cream at a cute place called Pelicans where they serve huge scoops for cheap. Before we could stop her, Nicole got out of the car and went right to this blue ice cream trash can and LICKED it!

We decided to give her a blue snowcone after that. She LOVED ordering "blue ice" and then kept going back to the window in front of everyone else in line and peeked through the window. The teenager serving everyone really liked making Nicole happy and put SO much blue in that Nicole got dyed VERY blue. The eating areas are all painted these pastel colors that make it fun.

Eating her "blue."

Michael begged food from everyone and generally ran around. No surprise there. This trip really gave the kids a great outlet for energy and they were exhausted every night. Sunday night Michael was literally asleep while drinking from his sippy cup it was hilarious.

Dad had a scoop of chocolate black cherry and I had chocolate oreo!

Jim ate some of Nicole's blue too but I think Nicole takes the medal for best blue coverage.