Feeling a bit cabin feverish from being held captive at home by slowly melting snow all week, we headed downtown this afternoon to visit the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. It was a surprisingly impressive museum, one you'd expect to find in a city much larger than Raleigh, and was extremely busy. We'll be sure to go back again since we probably missed a lot of the displays. Gavin was shy with so many people around and wanted to be held during most of our visit, but he enjoyed seeing and feeling new things.

A skinny crab...

There was actually a display where you could guess which animal the scat belonged to. The black bear had the largest, um, sample.

Sea coral feels interesting...

The ginormous whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling was very impressive...

As were the little possums...

Gavin stands in the footprint of an Acrocanthosaurus - a large dinosaur that looks much like a tyrannosaurus and once roamed the land that is now the southern portion of the United States.

Man, if his foot was this big, I wonder what size diaper he wears!

While navigating the streets back to our car, we stumbled upon the state capitol building and decided to take a walk around.

Free of any mamby-pamby hand-holding, Gavin gets a good stride going.

Sidewalk cracks are normally tricky to navigate, but Gavin just plows through with blatent disregard for Mommy's back.