It doesn't quite compare to petting rhinos and holding baby jaguars (which my boys are still jealous of, Kerali), but we enjoyed our day at Hogle Zoo with Liz and Drake, Marenda and Addie, and my parents. The weather was great and we were really impressed with the new improvements at the zoo. The only downside were the many many school field trips that were going on while we were there. It made me really glad I'd color-coded my children for easy spotting. :-)

For the science class that Liz teaches the kids we raised caterpillars to Painted Lady butterflies. The kit we bought made it very easy, and it was quite fascinating to watch the process. Personally, I found the caterpillars most interesting (if a little creepy). We kept the butterflies for several days (we ended up with 5) before releasing them in the backyard on the 24th.

On April 10th, Mitchell had his 6-month well-baby check. He weighs a little under 18 lbs. (about 54th percentile) and measures in the 92nd percentile. He's pretty long and lean, but he's so very active and wiggly that I'm betting he's as chubby as he's going to get. I can't believe how quickly time is passing--or maybe it's just the sleep-depravation-induced haze that makes it seem so fast.

At 6 months, Mitchell is starting to show his definite preference for me to have him. Sheridan is actually a fairly close second (depending on how tired or hungry Mitchell is). We're making progress on solid foods, but Mitchell still isn't really fond of them. He's much more interested in the spoon. He's a very fun baby. I just wish I could convince him to sleep a little more (ok, a lot more).

In the first picture, Mitchell is in a cusion cave the boys made so he could play (wild cats, raptors, birds, or something like that) with them. The last picture is Mitchell at the Hogle Zoo. I don't know that he saw many animals, but he was really quite content as long as we stayed on the move.

These were the best pictures of Marcus at Gymnastics on Saturday. I love the tongue-action he's got going on. In the last picture, Marcus is jumping from the trampoline into the foam pit. Everybody loves the foam pit.

Saturday was the last day of gymnastics for the boys, and Guy went and followed them around and took pictures. Unfortunately, many of the pictures came out pretty blurry, but this still gives you a little idea of what the boys have been up to every Saturday since the beginning of January. I think they both really enjoyed it. Sheridan wanted me to point out that he landed his flips on the trampoline. My favorite picture is his balance beam dismount :-)

On Friday, after more swimming at the hotel, driving around to some of Guy's old Moab haunts, and finding the last of our dinosaur sites, we made it to Price, Utah in time to do a quick tour of the dinosaur museum at the College of Eastern Utah. For a small school, they have a rather impressive little museum. This school is big into paleontology and sponsored the group that first discovered the Utahraptor (see the second picture) which was pretty exciting for the boys.

By the time we made it to Double Arch, Mitchell was finally getting a good nap, Caleb was tired, and Marcus just wanted to read "Calvin and Hobbes" so Guy and Sheridan took the short hike to the arch and had some father-son bonding time climbing over rocks. The last picture shows the view from the arch, including the parking area where, if the resolution were better, you'd be able to see me standing beside the van entertaining Caleb with some binoculars.

Delicate Arch is probably THE landmark for the state of Utah, so we had to go see it. The hike right up to Delicate is longer than we had time for (and too much for Caleb, I'm quite sure), so we took a shorter hike to this view of the arch.

I wanted to include this one partly because it's one of the few pictures we got of the rocks against the blue sky. The day was mostly cloudy, so the pictures aren't as impressive as some I've taken on previous trips.

This was the kids' favorite arch because it had great sand underneath it that they played in. Sheridan, of course, had to climb stuff.