A really great day

Kids and I had a stellar day today, checking out the wonders to behold at the May Museum of Natural History and the Space Exploration Museum of the same proprietor... The tropical bug and creature collections at the Natural History museum were pretty cool, and pretty creepy at the same time (who knew, a beetle so large it would knock a man down if it flew into him).  The space museum, well...Kyle found it "super cool" and I found it to be three musty trailer houses full of a loony old man's space posters and old newspapers.  To each his own, I suppose.

We hit the coolest place for a treat before we came home - Squeak Soda Shop, across town, is a joint that makes their own flavored soda pop, whatever color you want it, with regular old sugar syrup and some pretty interesting flavors (one day I might gather up the guts to try the cucumber or the buttered popcorn, but I think the lavender won't make it onto my taste menu).  They have food too, and ice cream, and rows and rows of bins of candy they sell by the pound.  It's kind of a funky Candy-Man-from-Willy-Wonka kind of place, and Kyle was in seventh heaven because he got to play Wii in between sips of his float.

The combinations we tried were as such:  Kyle had blue-colored Black Cherry soda over Death by Chocolate ice cream.  Yum.  Ugly but tasty.  Hayley had yellow-colored marshmallow soda over cookie dough ice cream.  Tasted good, but smelled fabulous and even made the house smell yummy for a couple hours when we brought half of it home.  And I had raspberry soda (red colored, how pathetically normal) over jamaican coconut ice cream.  Yummy too.

We came home, took a sugar-coma nap, and then after dinner went over to the stadium to see the post-game fireworks show; laid in the back of the truck with blankets and a whopping bowl of fresh buttery popcorn and mexican cokes.

And now - it's bedtime - we're getting up an hour before the crack of dawn so we can venture down to the Colorado Springs Balloon Classic.