A Day of Animals

Although we ended up giving Paxton an eviction notice and inducing labor 12 days after his due date, there were a couple of points in the weeks leading up to his due date that gave us every indication that labor was quite immeninent.

In fact, I had heard about an attraction just over and hour from us that I thought would make a fun day out for our family but that seemed like an awfully long way to drive back in increasingly intense pain if I randomly went into labor while we were there, so I called it a wash and put it on our list for next summer.  In lui of that, I looked for things for us to do closer to home and one Saturday we had a day of animals.

I am signed up for a local newsletter that sends out weekly newsletters with information about upcoming local activities, events and programs for children and families.  One week I noticed that there would be a free reptile display at the mall, so we piled in and checked it out.

Kendra really got a kick out of it:

It was mostly different varieties of snakes, but there were some lizards and even, as you can see, an alligator.  I was pretty impressed when she correctly identified a rattlesnake in one of the boxes.


Smart girl!  Though now that I think about it, she probably picked it up from Dora the Explorer...but still.

There was also a table for the employees to handle the animals let people (mostly children) touch them, too.  Kendra was pretty stoked!


No fear for this one!  At least, not this time.

It turns out, it takes a significantly greater amount more than non-zero effort to leave the house with 2 small children and a nine-months-pregnant woman in tow so when we went around the entire reptile display twice in twenty minutes, we decided we had not gotten our effort's worth out of leaving the house and found a second destination.

We had heard about Shaver's Creek a couple of times but never managed to get out to it.  We were one of only two groups there at the time so we had each attraction to ourselves while we were there, it was pretty neat.

First, we walked through a display of tanks and hands-on activities in the main building that were all centered around educating about local Pennsylvania wildlife.

There was also a pretty neat loft that Grant and the kids crawled up to and played in for a while but the stairs were all kinds of too steep for me to feel comfortable climbing with my extremely altered center of gravity and my sixty-inch waist.

From there, we headed outside and checked out all the birds in the Raptor Center, where they house birds who have been injured and wouldn't survive in the wild.

This is only a small sample of the birds that were there, there were a couple dozen at least.  The Bald Eagles were Kendra's favorites by far!


After we spent a good chunk of time checking out the birds of prey, Elliot and I were pretty beat and weren't up for hanging around another half an hour for the demonstration, so we made our way back through the trails to our car and headed home.

The closest major city with big attractions like zoos and things is an hour and a half away in Harrisburg, but it's really nice that there are still fun and interesting things to explore out here in our little oasis town!