Sound Bites & Snap Shots

When Bill was trolling the internet for Merit Badge Universities, he came across one that piqued his curiosity.  The Great American Human Foosball was offering one to earn the Personal Fitness Merit Badge, a required Eagle badge.  The group setting was enough to motivate us to call for more information but the idea of human foosball?  Even better!  We enrolled Walker for the afternoon session and put a road trip to St. Louis on the calendar.

With Mason’s interest in gardens, the proximity of the Missouri Botanical Garden was a perfect venue for the rest of us.  It was just a few miles away and offered an large indoor area called a Climatron.  Though it was grey, dreary and cold outside, the temperature inside the geodesic dome was lovely.  We spotted the work of Dale Chihuly on exhibit in the main building and the Climatron.  He has another beautiful piece at the Indy Children’s Museum which is how I became acquainted with his work.

The plant above is called a cycad.  It is an evergreen gymnosperm, or a cone bearing plant, often confused with a palm.

We didn’t have any big agenda while we were there.  We moved leisurely through the buildings and stopped to take in what we saw. 

Of special note was this critter.  Way back when Bill was in the Coast Guard, he studied parasites as part of his Preventative Medicine Training.  The man can still identify bugs as is if it were yesterday.  (I’m not surprised.  Are you?)  See those stripes on the legs?  That tells us it’s an aedes aegypti.

Before heading back to pick up Walker, we stopped at a coffee house for a little refreshment.  While I was waiting, I noticed this bulletin board entitled, “Coffee for the People.”  Each of those sleeves is marked with a description.  If you meet the criteria, you get to remove the sleeve for a cup of Joe.  Some of them read things like:

One free coffee if you live in Old St. Louis

A coffee for whoever has to deal with Leukemia.  I wish you the best.

1 coffee for a tired single mama

A pour over for Anna Martin for her birthday

A vanilla latte for a parent who has a child in the hospital

1 free Americano for a teacher doing some grading

Talk about a great way to practice acts of kindness.  I wonder if there is a way to bring that to life at home.

Meanwhile, back at Great American Human Foosball, Walker was learning all about fitness. He and the group ran a mile and did push-ups and reaches. This merit badge requires twelve weeks of recorded fitness and a improvement from when he started. 

Here is a quick video of the game in action:

The other thing that this place offered was life-sized versions of games like pool (with soccer ball sized billiards), checkers using colored floor tiles and plungers for pawns and connect four.  Whoever created this had quite the vision and with a fairly low budget has made a wonderful place for kids of all ages to blow off some steam. 

We finished up the evening with a trip to Anthonino’s.  The boys and I went there last year after dropping my parents off at the airport.  We had a wonderful meal then and this time as well.  The fried ravioli are definitely tasty!

Some might say St. Louis is quite the distance to travel for a merit badge but we wrapped up a whole lot of fun in our day.