Louisville Part 2

Nana and PawPaw left on Monday, and Rach and Jackson spent the rest of the week checking out all the family-friendly activities of Louisville. We went for walks through 4th Street Live, went to the Kid Art exhibit at the Speed Art Museum, and went to the Kentucky Derby Museum.

It was at the Derby Museum that Rach realized she might have a future jockey in the family.

He's too light for the job right now, but the boy is small for his age, and he loves horses. He climbed right up onto this one and pushed Rach away. He then refused to get down until she baited him with the promise of seeing more horses outside.

As you can see from the video, the kid is pretty comfortable in the (fake) saddle. He drew quite the crowd of old ladies, and you can hear them in the background gushing over how cute he is.

We also got to go on a tour of the track, and Jackson took his first trip to the winner's circle. He took a good, long look around. Maybe he was planning the triumphant return he'll make years from now.

We spent our evenings with Susie and usually with our friends Staci and Matt, who were also in town for the AP Reading. One evening we headed down to Louisville Slugger Field to see the Bats take on the Iron Pigs in a AA baseball match up.

We sat on the outfield grass, ate ball park food, and cheered some good, clean baseball. We also got one of our new favorite family pictures.

Another night we went out for Japanese food (steak and sushi), as is our AP tradition.

This was Jackson's first trip for Hibachi. He was pretty leery of all the fire, but he was impressed too. He couldn't take his eyes off all that food.

He is apparently a big fan of Asian cuisine because he wasn't about to give up those chop sticks anytime soon.

Finally the reading was over, and Susie got to enjoy some time with the boy too. He showed off all his newly acquired truck knowledge by "reading" his book to mama. He can point to the excavator, crane, front end loader, dump truck, etc., when you ask him to.

We spent our last morning in Louisville visiting the Science Center. Rach and Jack had been earlier in the week and had had so much fun that we wanted to take Susie there too.

They have a whole section of the museum for kids 7 and under to play in "real life" types of experiences. Jackson really liked "driving" things. First he got to drive the ambulance with mama. He even turned on the sirens,

Then we let the pigeon drive the bus. He has dreams you know!

Finally he flew the up-up. Apparently he was both pilot and fight attendant because after we took off, he served us our in-flight snack.

After the science center, Jackson really felt like he had done all he cared to do in Louisville. He made it very clear that he was ready to go home.

We couldn't have agreed with him more. After being gone for 15 days, we were all ready to head home, and that's exactly what we did.

With one small stop along the way . . .