The Land of Lincoln

On Monday, which was also Labor Day, Kenny didn't have work so we decided to head up to Springfield, IL to check it out. Before we were even 3 minutes away from home Kenny says, do you know what a soy bean looks like? And I said no. He told me that was embarrassing, being his wife and all haha. So he pulls the car over (there's lots of soy bean fields around here) and we get out of the car to see one. He shows me the plant and points out some stuff, picks one, breaks open the shell/casing thing (they're enclosed like peas are) and makes me eat one! He can't help himself, he's a farmer.

Anyway, so we make it to Springfield, it's only about an hour away which is awesome. We stop at the Visitor's Center to get tickets for our tour of Lincoln's home and see what's there. We thought our tickets were pretty funny. They have characters on them from the Lincoln family, so we each got one. Kenny was Abe Lincoln, I was his wife, Mary. Tyler got to be one of the sons, Robert, and Brynlee was the dog Fido. We had a good laugh at that, as we looked over at her playing in the dirt next to us, we realized it was pretty fitting :).

Here we are in front of the Lincoln family's house. Brynlee was a monster during the tour and Kenny ended up leaving halfway through to take her outside, where we could still hear her screaming through some of it. She had woken up way too early that morning.

Thankfully she fell asleep in the car on the way to the beautiful Capitol building and slept through the entire tour here. Words cannot describe how gorgeous this building is. We got to see the Senate Gallery, and the House Gallery, and the first Supreme Court room, etc. The whole thing is magnificent and breathtaking.

This was closed for tours for the day, but we were fine with that. This is where Lincoln worked as a Lawyer for quite a while.

We have a thing with posing identically to the statues we see wherever we go. I will spare you of all the other ones, but this one was too cute to pass up. The building in the back left of this pic. is the old capitol building. Apparently the current one is the sixth one, crazy huh?

Our last stop was the Lincoln Presidential Museum. This place is so cool. They have a lot of really well-done exhibits and shows and we were all very impressed. This picture is us with the Lincoln family. They had 4 sons, and lost 3 at different times. (Does this picture freak anyone else out, even just a little bit? There's a lot of manaquins all over and sometimes it was scaring me thinking some guy was staring at me, till I realized he was fake.)

They even had a children's section with lots of dress-ups and toys. The kids were having a great time up until Brynlee fell into the corner of a chest, screamed like a demon, and got a nice mark on her head. I decided we can't take her anywhere. She is the most accident-prone girl I've ever met.

On the way home we stopped at the Farmer's Market in Hamel. It just so happened to be the last day of the season it was open, so everything was $1!! Kenny went a little crazy and got 17 jars of jams, salsas, and other unusual things like pickled watermelon rind and cauliflower, etc. I got a couple bags of Kettle corn :) Anyway we love finding great deals like that.

It was a great day, overall. We learned a lot and saw some really cool things. It was a much needed holiday.