a tour and a flamingo

Since today's weather was somewhat bearable, we decided to head to downtown Birmingham and go exploring. I printed out this downtown Birmingham walking tour on a travel website to help us find places worth seeing. In a few paragraphs in, it read, "continue walking west on 3rd Avenue North to find some unusual stores" and "you may first notice the old Goodyear Shoe Hospital sign... ask for Rhonda. She can tell you a lot about Birmingham and repair your shoes at the same time." It made me realize that either the travel website is terrible or that downtown Birmingham is pretty mediocre.

 I gave Spencer and Jack a customized walking tour of downtown Birmingham. Interpretation: I sarcastically read facts off of the printed paper while both Spencer and Jack whined the whole time and made me cut the tour short! The latter of my two theories was confirmed - downtown Birmingham isn't that great.
(At least in the daytime with no money to spend and with Spencer and Jack who decided to bag the Civil Rights District at the end! I'm sure that would have at least been interesting!)

And now for some not so super exciting pictures:

We then stopped by the zoo on the way home. Spencer loves that we have Jack as an excuse to get zoo passes this year.

Out of all of the beastly animals at the zoo, our manly stud of a son is absolutely, positively, terrified of flamingoes! FLAMINGOS!!! The kid even has a freaking flamingo censor! Whenever we were in earshot of the flamingo honks he would cry as hard as he cried when he got his shots! It was soooo sad. (And a teensy bit funny. Am I horrible?!)

In Jack's defense, they are pretty freaky/scary/gross looking when you are right up close to them, plus their honk is super loud/annoying, and I am a pretty mean/terrible mother for telling Spencer to move Jack closer to those terrifying birds.




























See freaky, right?
So what if my son is scared of pink birds!?