New Year Missouri Trip 2023

Since we hadn't been able to visit Emily's family for Thanksgiving, we decided to go for a new year trip instead. We left on Wednesday the 28th around 7:30am. On the way we stopped for lunch at an Applebees and learned that Wednesday is free kids' meal day with the purchase of an adult entree. Score! Allison fell asleep after lunch and Tyler pretended to sleep next to her for the picture.

At our last stop for gas, Tyler opened the door for a man coming in behind him. This particular gas station had a Baskin Robbins attached to it, and the man decided to reward him by buying him a scoop of ice cream. When he saw we had a daughter too, he also bought one for her. The scooper was surprised that Tyler picked coconut ice cream. She said she's never seen a kid pick coconut. 

I see from these pictures that Emily's family cleaned up the basement the day we came. I never actually saw it this way since we hung out upstairs most of the night, and by the time we went downstairs, the kids had covered it in the Duplos and Duplo trains we'd handed down to them. 

We arrived just in time for Joseph's 5th birthday party.

We'd stayed at their home when we came for 3 nights in September, but we figured we should get a hotel this time since we were there for a longer stay. We left Tyler and Allison at their house that night in order to attend the temple the next morning without needing to take the extra time to drop them off.

After our session at the KC temple we came back to their house then I took Emily, Mary, Bonnie, and Allison to Glo-Wild Lanterns at the zoo. Not that the boys wouldn't have enjoyed it, but I figured the girls would appreciate it more, and we left late enough that Emily was able to put baby Millie to bed and have a baby free night out.

The girls wanted to bow down in front of the lion since he's the king. 

Here are some of my favorites. The giant temple looked amazing, though it was definitely succumbing a bit to the elements. They'd had this display up since early September, and we came for the 2nd to last day. 

The girls liked posing in the photo frame and Allison enjoyed the flamingos.

This swan was gorgeous!

The girls and I all posed and pretended we had rainbow wings. 

This aquatic area was really pretty.

I had to get a picture in front of the Sydney opera house, and walking through this giant whale was pretty neat.

They also had a North pole/Santa/Arctic area. The reindeer were more impressive than these photos represent.

We enjoyed walking through the rainbow tunnel and seeing the kangaroos.

We finished up walking through this awesome dragon tunnel and seeing the Chinese acrobats show. Mary does gymnastics, so she was extra impressed with these guys' balancing skills. The part where he walked in circles in the air around the pole completely blew my mind.

The next day we went to the zoo again, but this time in the day time to see the animals. We had Emily's family for Christmas this year, and we knew they liked their zoo, so we purchased them a family annual zoo pass. I had it left at will call for them, so it took a few minutes to go in and process it and purchase some guest passes for our family. While Emily and I were in there the kids climbed around on the stone structure outside the entrance. The employee said to Emily and I "you must be sisters!" We're actually 10th cousins once removed, but close enough, right?

We took the tram to Africa, which was a bit of a bust. It was in the low 40's, so most of the animals were in their indoor areas, which aren't accessible to the public. Then we barely missed the tram back and didn't want to wait 30 minutes for the next one since there wasn't anything else to see there. We walked back, which got a bit challenging for 2 year old Clark, so we decided to put Clark in Millie's stroller and carry her up the hill. We were all pretty tired once we made it to the top, so we let the kids play on the elephant statues and took a little rest.

We then went in and saw the bird show. This was a ruby macaw, a cross breed between a scarlet macaw and a green macaw. 

Afterwards we took the kids on the carousel and down to see the penguins.

At first we couldn't find Allison when we went into the penguin area. She'd found this giant touch screen game (picture top left) on the bottom floor. 

The primate area was super fun. In the video Clark tries to open the window to pet the tamarin.

The video isn't the best example, but these gibbons were super active and fun to watch. They had a nice habitat that could go up and over the walkway to the other side. It was fun to be below them and see them swinging above us.

We finished up with a train ride. I rode with Clark, who likes making selfies. It was nice to have him warm up to me much more this trip. He loved me as an infant, he seemed wary of me in Utah a year later, and he was pretty indifferent to me this past September. This trip he really seemed to like and trust me. 

The next day (New Year's Eve) I took James, Joseph, Tyler, and Allison to Legoland Discovery Center. Emily and Millie came along in place of Oscar.

First we rode the flying ride. I rode with James since you have to be 48+ inches to do it without an adult. I got our vehicle in the air, but it was tough. I had to really paddle. Tyler and Allison weren't able to get theirs airborne, which really frustrated Allison. There was a a second ride that was better (gamelike where you shoot at targets), but both rides suffered from low capacity and slow loading lines (which is also true of the full size theme park in California). Fortunately they let us do a parent swap with Millie so Emily got a chance to ride the rides too.

While we were at Legoland, Oscar stayed back with the other kids and let them bake cupcakes with chocolate chips and pink buttercream frosting.

The kids posed with Lego gingerbread man and Allison spent quite a bit of time in the Lego friends area. 

All the kids got a lot of good playtime in. Joseph climbed right up on the Duplo table, and Tyler put a lot of time into making this Lego pizza. There was also a neat play structure they all enjoyed. If we had a Legoland Discovery in our area I would definitely get them a season pass.

James rocked the revolving climbing wall. When it wasn't his turn he did this awesome Ninja dance to the Ninjago music. 

Allison and Tyler took a turn on the climbing wall too.

I got in some cuddles with Millie while Emily watched the kids enjoy a few more activities. 

We finished up letting the kids take a ride on the virtual roller coaster. It was James' first roller coaster experience, and he cheered when it was over. That evening I teased him saying "you didn't enjoy that roller coaster at all, did you?" He reacted with "I LOVED IT! IT WAS THE BEST!!!"

We took a break to get some lunch then went back to the SeaLife Aquarium.

Allison liked the petting area and the jellyfish.

They had these bubbles the kids could stand in to get a close view of the fish and make it look like the kids are in the tank too.

I put Millie in this little fish tunnel. She tolerated it just long enough for me to get a picture.

Later that night we took the older kids swimming then went back to Emily's house to celebrate New Year. Allison only stayed awake until 10:30pm, but the rest of the older kids all made it to midnight, even 5 year old Joseph. 

On Monday Oscar took the older boys to do MagiQuest at Great Wolf Lodge while I took the older girls swimming at the hotel. The boys had lots of fun and stayed about 7 hours trying to get through the whole game, but towards the end there was a lot of glitching. Oscar said there were other annoying aspects, like whenever they'd fail to defeat the dragon and want to try again, they had to re-listen to its two minute monologue every time without being able to skip it. Another family said their kids went to bed in tears because they hadn't been able to do it. Oscar said they'd just decided to give up only to have Dillan defeat the dragon right afterwards (admittedly it was his 12th attempt, but it must have still been rough for them to see someone else do what they couldn't do). It's the same game at all Great Wolf Lodge's, and it saves your progress in your wand, so I told Dillan and Justin whenever they come to visit us, they can bring their wands and we can try going to the Colorado Springs location to see if the final quests are less glitchy.

That night I got in some good Auntie cuddles. We weren't leaving until the next morning, but we decided to say our goodbyes on Monday before going back to the hotel so we could get on the road right away in the morning.

The kids had had many nights of staying up late, so they were pretty tired on the drive home. Even Tyler fell asleep.

There'd been a lot of snow in Colorado while we were gone (while Missouri had been warmer than usual for that time of year. We picked a good time to go). Thankfully the Trujillo family had shoveled part of our driveway when they came to take care of the cats. We tried coming up the non-plowed side since that's the side our car goes into the garage, but we slid back down. Then we tried the plowed side and just barely made it up our little hill into our garage.