labor day weekend

we took advantage of the long weekend (all off for ryan!) and packed in all kinds of things from our bucket list.

saturday we went down to the discovery science center.  they were giving away free tickets to a couple of zoos in the area with admission, so we took advantage of the deal before it was gone.

they had all kinds of fun, hands-on things to do and look at.  very first thing when you walked in was a giant pin wall.  ryan showed cody how to push his hand into it.

watching the balls fall through different viscosities.

they had a kids area where we tried to get cody to put on a turtle shell before he climbed through.  it was off about as fast as it was put on and he was through the tunnel even faster.

they had a fish pond projected on the floor.  cody loved dancing and watching the ripples in the water.

no way could ryan pass up the opportunity to fly a miniature plane.

i went ahead and tried full out flying for myself, but didn't even make it off the floor.

they had a 'science of hockey' exhibit.  ryan did some skating and we made a life-size hockey player cody

then we waited forever to take a turn driving the zamboni.

cody and ryan built a lego satellite and i built a little rocket ship. 

(mine went a lot faster without cody 'helping')

we went outside for a while where we shot off rockets and hunted for dinosaur bones and fossils.  luckily it was too hot, so we had quite an adventure.

on our way out, ryan gave the bed of nails a shot.  sounds like we won't be replacing our mattress any time soon.

it was definitely a fun museum with lots of fun things to do.

monday we barely made it for $1 entry to the los angeles county fair.  i've been to a couple of fairs, but nothing compares with the size of this one!

we mostly just walked around and looked at stuff, but our first stop - of course - was the animal area.  cody loved the cows, sheep, chickens, and pigs and made each of their sounds when he saw them.

the exhibit with all the kids artwork was probably my favorite.  they had little stations set up with giant sized games like scrabble and hangman.

the whole place is so huge that it was a little hard to find any other exhibits, but we had fun searching and browsing.

they have cut-outs you can take pictures in all over the place.  we couldn't pass this one up once cody saw it.  he stood and pointed at each dog for a good minute after we took the picture.

 

on our way out we stopped to eat at the pink's famous hot dogs cart.  another stop on our l.a. bucket list. not too bad, but what we really wanted was a good smoothie that we made when we got home to cool off from a super hot afternoon.

the fair was fun and big, but i think i'd prefer a smaller, more 'home-town' kind of fair next time.  maybe next year we'll even be able to enter some things again....wherever we may be...