Day 3 - Omaha Children's Museum

Our last morning in Omaha, we headed out around 9:00 to get some Scooter's coffee (Scooters coffee made its start in Nebraska)....we LOVE their coffee. Anyway, we then headed downtown to the Omaha Children's' Museum. Wow, this was one cool place to take the kids! If I lived there, I'd have a season pass to go at least once a week......great playgroup attraction! There was a playground room where there was a playhouse set-up, fire station set-up, and grocery store. The kids loved this room and played in it the majority of the time. The other room had a craft area, where the kids did make a craft, it also had a box full of moon-sand...Luke would have stayed there all day if we let him. There were several other rooms along with a dinosaur exhibit upstairs. We had a great time and we stayed for 3+ hours. After that we headed to downtown Omaha for another round of Pizza and ice cream before hitting the road back to KC.

Day 2 - Omaha Zoo

We were up early this morning...even a dark hotel room cannot fool Luke that it's 7am!! Before heading to the zoo we had to stop at a Scooter's for some coffee and scones. We were at the zoo by 8:30. Needless to say, we were basically the first family into the park. We started the day with a butterfly exhibit, then the giraffes, zebras, train-ride, carousel........and all of the other animals in the zoo. We were there until 3:30 that afternoon; the temperatures were in the low 80's and it was over-casted! Awesome weather for August! We later asked the kids what their favorite part of the zoo was. Luke liked seeing the kangaroos and getting his whale, which he named Pirate. Luke never let his whale out of his sight since getting it! Hope's favorite part of the zoo was seeing the elephants. She also got a little stuffed turtle, she name Winna.....who knows where she came up with that name, but we thought it was pretty creative! We left the zoo to head back to the hotel, and it only took a few minutes and both kids were asleep. Mark had the idea to 'transfer' them to the room to continue the nap ("yea, right!") and as soon as we got them to the room they were awake ready for the next activity! We regrouped and ate dinner at Jimmy John's (enough of nasty Mc Donald's) and then headed back to the hotel to do some serious swimming w/o any injuries this time. After the swim, we went to DQ, Mark's request to have dessert. On the way to trying to find a park to play at, the kids fell asleep again! This time it was about 8:00 PM, so we wanted to get them back to the room and not let them sleep any longer in the car, or we knew they would catch their second wind and want to be up a long time!

Day 1 - Pizza, Cosmic Bowling, & Swimming

Upon arriving in Omaha, we checked-in to our hotel then headed out for some pizza. My dad's Garmin Nuvi gave us numerous options...we chose a local place called Zio's New York Pizza. The pizza was great but Luke and Hope were ready to head to the bowling alley. Again, we used dad's Nuvi to find a bowling alley close to the hotel...the first one had league bowling going on and therefore no 'open bowling'...the second one was empty but was not smoke-free. The third one had a full parking lot and was smoke free. It was called Mockingbird lanes and was about 2 miles from our hotel. The whole bowling alley was dark (on purpose) and they were playing loud music and a disco ball was shining little lights all over the bowling alley. Luke loved the music and it was hard to keep him focused on the bowling because he was having so much fun dancing to the music! We bowled one game because it takes a long time (and a lot of patience) to bowl with a 2 and 3 year-old.

After that we headed to TCBY for a little ice cream, which we took back to the room to eat.

Up next was a trip to the pool. The entire pool is only 2 to 4 feet deep, so it is great for little kids. We thought we might have the place to ourselves but there were a lot of other families swimming as well. The pool had a mushroom that spilled water out of its top, a little slide in the shape of a frog and a bigger slider towards the deep end. Luke and Hope had a blast! Luke loved going down the frog slide and could swim (with life jacket) all over the pool with no problem. Hope like the shallow end where she could walk but was mostly interested in going over to the hot tub and putting her feet in. After little while I decided to ride down the bigger slide with Luke, but mis-judged just how shallow the pool was. In attempting to prevent Luke from going under the water, I scraped my foot on the bottom of the pool, ripping off one of my toe nails in the process. Sloan knew by the look on my face that something went wrong. From that point on I was sitting on the side trying to get my toe to stop bleeding! Sorry for the details.

After that it was back to the hotel room where we were attempting to stay in a normal hotel room with 2 queen beds. We watched the Olympics for a little while then turned out the lights...it took Luke and Hope about 30 minutes to fall asleep because they were having too much fun making noises back and forth at each other. That's it for day one.

2008 Omaha Zoo Trip

This blog will provide an account of Mark, Sloan, Luke and Hope's trip to the zoo in Omaha. The plan right now is to leave for Omaha on Sunday and go bowling on our first night in Omaha, visit the zoo on Monday and a children's museum on Tuesday.

That's it for now, check back on Sunday night for another posting.

MSL&H