This post is serious photo overload. And you know this is after I struggled to keep it down to this many instead of the 40 or so that I wanted to include!

On Father's Day we drove out to Long Island to spend the day with great grandma and great grandpa. We started the morning at church with them, and then spent the afternoon at their house. The kids just love their great grandparents!

With their daughter..

Is this a cool great grandpa or what?!

This Turtle Pond had so many turtles and interesting birds. All three kids loved it, especially when an older man gave them bread to toss in.

Scenes like these made us just want to pack up and move here. Sure, we have awesome parks where we live, but still....

Ben was pretty amazed.

Having the stroller all week worked well for everyone. When Ben wanted out, an older sibling would immediately take a rest. Good thing our skinny kiddos are still under the weight limit!

A few playground stops were a must.

And we had such pretty walks to get back to our hotel!

First up was the Hall of Mammals. These were pretty cool and definitely interesting to the kids. The fact that these are real animals was amazing to them and even to us (that moose is HUGE!). The dioramas had such fun backgrounds too.

Cheetahs!

Once we came out of the mammal halls, we found lots of tables set up with all sorts of interesting things to see. This was part of the Choose Your Ology exhibit, and our kids zoomed right in to the bugs. There were some seriously scary things in there. Hello, bird spider. But the people working at each table were so great. They spent a long time talking to the kids about each bug, letting them listen to and examine seashells, and letting them pet animal furs. One highlight for both of them was getting to hold this caterpillar.

Giant tree stump. This photo doesn't do it justice at all.

Nathan has a book from his childhood with a picture of a blue whale replica. Since we've read that book many times, the kids were super excited to find this one. See that little brown dome in the back? That was an inflatable building that you could sit in as they projected a video of coral and sea plants on the ceiling. We all climbed in to watch, but as that first picture panned across the ceiling Ben flipped out and Nathan had to crawl out with him. The older two didn't want it to end though.

One of the first things we did when we arrived was pick up timed tickets to the Discovery Room. It was really a cute place, with lots of hands on activities for the kids. One of their favorites was the scavenger hunt. They each got a clipboard with a list of things to find on this giant indoor tree, and they loved having their own flashlights to check out all the nooks and crannies.

The boys kept playing while Anna sat with a graduate student and did a short little activity for her research project. Something about how kids learn about birds?

The excavation sites are always a hit.

And of course they were all excited to see the dinosaur wing.

I just felt grateful that these things were extinct!

There were many, many, other exhibits and fun things to see, and we felt like we were able to see quite a bit. The main lobby was a fun and interesting place to sit just before the museum closed.

But the boys just saw it as another fun place to drive cars.

In the shadow of this guy.