The Braegger Family Blog: Summer Staycation part 3

We continued enjoying our Connect Pass on the 22nd at Tracy Aviary.

Christian was so excited to find a big feather (probably from the turkey vulture).

Faith got selected to participate in the bird show!

We compared it to Hogle Zoo's bird show and, even though the zoo's was a bit more polished and spectacular, we enjoyed the aviary's more. It was so up close and personal, we learned a lot and there was a lot of child participation.

Tony and the kids got to give a raven their dollar donation.

Joy says I always post unflattering pictures of her on my blog. To keep with tradition, I thought I'd include this gem of facial expression:

After the aviary, we stopped in for a bite to eat at Moochie's because Jordan had heard they had the best cheesesteak sandwiches. I can't say that I was very impressed, it was expensive and not nearly as good as Charlie's in the Layton Hills mall food court.

We then drove up to Snowbird to ride the tram up the mountain. The kids remembered it from the year before and were super excited!

We got some fun pictures at the top.

And got to have a snowball fight at the end of July!

After that we went to the Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point.

We LOVED this hands-on physics of movement exhibit!

We got to make cloud rings,

trick our eyes with a "Benham Disk," make magnets float, play with a rope sqirter and many more amazing things.

After the special exhibit, we enjoyed all the dinosaur awesomeness.

So much fun! Afterward Tony, I and the kids went to Sizzler for dinner.

On the 23rd we started out with a Lowe's craft.

Then we went to the aquarium! We were disappointed that it was no longer on the Connect Pass, but I got a good coupon online and that just gave us more time to enjoy the sea creatures. Joy's family opted not to go since they'd just been recently. Just inside the front door they will take your picture against a green screen and you can pay to have it superimposed over an ocean scene. It was a bit pricey, so I took the kids' photo and did the editing at home:

Instead of making the kids see the exhibits before petting the stingrays, we went straight there.

They spent a good hour enjoying their favorite buddies,

We enjoyed some other exhibits,

went back to the stingrays for thirty minutes, saw some more exhibits,

the penguin feeding,

miscellaneous craziness,

and ended up back at the stingrays for a third time! Since we only go once a year, I'm glad they got an entire year's worth of stingray petting in!

We promised two items from the dollar store and got out of there without the usual gift shop drama! After we got our picks from Dollar Tree, we ate at the Olive Garden with some gift cards we had on hand.

And finished the night with some fireworks, including these giant sparklers.

For the 24th, the last day of our staycation, we went to Lagoon-A-Beach. We got tubes for the lazy river and did lots of water slides.

We loved our staycation and it was very inexpensive!

I thought I'd throw the rest of my July pictures on the end of this post. Here's Buddy on the 25th playing dress-up with our camping hatchet. Yay for safety mom.