We took our first family "vacation" over the weekend and ventured out to St Louis. We left last Fri when Jesse got off work and went straight to a Cabellas store that luckily ended up being attached to a mall! I was picturing chasing Hudson around the store while Jesse looked at everything, but it worked out. The mall had a great childrens area in the center of it so Hudson and I played on that for a while, and then a train pulled up that offered rides around the mall. Of course, Hudson made a mad dash for the train and was trying to scale the fence to get to it when I convinced him to go around the fence like all of the other children were! So we went on a train ride that turned out to be a neat way to see what stores were located in the mall. After the mall, we went downtown and met up with some of our friends who were in St Louis that weekend as well and we had dinner and then went back to the hotel to let the kids play.

Sat we went to Grant's Farm, which is just a little outside St Louis and that turned out to be fun for the adults and kids. Hudson got to ride a carousel, feed baby goats, and also ride on the tram, which he thought was a choo choo train. The goats were probably the funniest thing, though, because they knew that the people entering their area had milk in bottles for them, so they attacked! Hudson didn't like that, so we brought him back out and he fed them through a fence, and that was much more his speed! After Grant's Farm and naptime we went to a St Louis Cardinals game. We got first pitch tickets, so we only paid $5.50 per ticket, which ended up being a good thing. Hudson was more interested in standing at the back of the stadium and watching their metro trains come in and out than he was in watching the game, but we expected that. We visited the gift shop and found a mini wooden bat for him that he loved. He ended up finding a couple of older boys who had a ball and they were nice enough to picth the ball to him and let him pitch it to them a couple of times. He really thought that was neat! Below are some pictures from the weekend.

The summer is almost over already and Hudson will be 2 years old in less than a month. Isn't that crazy?! He's such a big boy now, he does or says something new every day it seems like. His big thing is anything that has to do with sports, especially baseball and basektball. He has a little ball and glove and a bat that he gets out at least once every day and we all take turns with them. He'll throw it to you, but only if you have your entire hand in the smallest glove ever made, and if you catch it, he smiles real big and says "Good Catch". Then he'll announce that it's his turn and he'll grab the bat or the glove and then we have to throw it to him. Right now, he's much better at throwing or catching the ball, but I guess that's allowed. Over the weekend we went to the Strassenfest, where Hudson got to ride some rides, play a few games, and even go on a choo choo train ride. He loved every minute of it, and there are pictures below of the rides and the train ride. The big grin is from when he finally heard the train whistle and we started to move.