More Tour de St. Louis

Wow, I haven't been here in a while! How quickly two weeks have passed. This entire summer has flown by. We're now in a short break between summer program and the start of Dominick's second year of preschool. I love how his first day is September 8, yet we pay for the whole month.

Over the past two weekends, we've visited two more places on our St. Louis tourism list. The first was the Museum of Transportation on August 9. I thought the boys would like a place devoted to trains and, to a lesser extent, cars, boats and airplanes. Dominick was most interested in the tracks and what he calls bumps (crossings). Their cousin Seth was here for the weekend, and in addition to that outing, the three older boys (that includes Mike, of course--I'm so outnumbered) played a round of golf.

This Sunday, we went to Powder Valley Nature Center and walked the longest trail (1 1/5 miles). Dominick and I had been there once before when he was about a year and a half old. The most lasting memory I have was of nearly losing him and his stroller down a very steep embankment. This time, I knew better, so we decided to forgo wheeled transportation and just carry Noel when necessary. The trail has several (non-stroller-accessible) bridges, which I thought Dom would like, but at one point he said, "Another bridge! That's enough bridges." We also saw some deer and two lizards.

Back to the subject of trains, the boys have been loving their new Thomas stuff. We have tracks all over the place, in addition to the original train table. Noel says "Thomas" about a hundred times a day. How fitting, since that's his middle name. Look what happened to this poor boy the other day, when he took a spill on the exterior basement stairs (I think he tripped over the hose). He'd just gotten over a scrape on his nose from tripping on a sidewalk the week before, too. Boyhood is full of scrapes and bruises, it seems.

Note: I've just added July's pictures to the Picasa album here.