St. Patty's Day

We have been trying to take some precautions related to food storage, family safety and security. No, we are not becoming Doomsday Preppers (a very entertaining show though) just yet, but we have decided that it might be better to be safe rather than sorry. Brett has been interested in buying a large safe for family valuables and purchasing guns and ammunition. I have been tasked with getting information on food storage and the like. It has been kind of fun...I even found the cutest baby chicks (so we could have our own eggs), but I don't think we are ready for that level of preparedness quite yet!

So, yesterday we went out to the Expo center to the Sportsman's Expo. Dad thought it would be a great place to get information on safes, guns, emergency preparedness, water purification and things like that. I was excited to go and learn, but was unsure how much fun the kiddos would have, but they were free - so whatever...but it was really FUN!

Our first stop was to hold the baby bears. It was an exhibit through Yellowstone to keep up the preserves for the bears. The kids were so excited that they were actually able to hold and pet the little guys. They were really cute (born just in January), although Colton was a little worried he was going to get a bear paw to the face! (Two days ago the kids were begging for baby chicks so we could have chickens, now they were begging for a baby bear - they live a rough life!).
After the bears, we checked out the archery for kids area. The kids really enjoyed being able to hold and shoot with real bows and arrows at the targets (stuffed turkeys, deer etc...).

Here are the boys learning about water erosion.
And learning about wildlife. You can't really see this clearly - but this was our favorite part. They had a large pool set up and had the dogs running to the end of a path and jump into the pool after a duck or some other toy. It was a contest to see which dogs would jump the farthest. They had this nationally recognized jumper there, and not only did it get farther than all of the other dogs, but also got major air. The kids loved watching her jump time after time. They actually wanted to stay and just keep waiting for her turn to come up just so they could watch this dog jump. I think we saw her 4 times!
We had a really fun family day in really the most unlikely place. Along with the activities (and we only did about half of them during our 3-4 hours there) we tasted all kinds of weird food storage foods, tried some different jerky's, and I was spoiled with a new necklace. On the way home the kids were saying that we should go to more expo's and can't wait for this one to come back around next year.