Texas A&M Vet School Open House

What a weekend! Well, really it was just a Saturday, but it was quite a trip.

Friday night we took the Girl Scouts down to College Station so that we would be there bright and early (and I do mean early - 6:30am!) to start the Texas A&M Vet School Open House tour.

It's about a 4 hour drive from where we live, so we arrived very late Friday night. Just enough time to check into our hotel and get some sleep.

But it was worth it. We saw things like the lizard in the first picture, and we touched him too - even me. He was soft!

We saw lots and lots of snakes.


We saw a blue tongued skink.


And then each of the girls held a python. Here's Kenzie holding it.


And Bailey - can you tell she's a little nervous holding this big snake?

And Tiffany - you can tell she was hating this.

And Steffanie:

And Elizabeth:

Here's me and Melissa. She's Tiffany's mom and our troop Cookie Mom, which is a huge job considering how many cookies we sold to get ready for our trip to England this summer. She was sweet enough to drive the other car down (it took 2 cars for all of us). She's tons of fun and I was very glad she came.

Here's Mary Helen and me. She's been with Girl Scouts forever and we are so very luck to have her as our troop leader. It's because of her that we are getting to go to England this summer.

Bailey got to hold a rat.

And the girls got to see how an endoscope works on a real cow lung.

We saw some typical animals as well too. Here's a very sweet doggy.

Bailey is suiting up to read x-rays in this demonstration.

In this room, they work on horses. The girls are being told how these frames help hold up a horse for surgery or treatment.

We got to see lots of x-rays.

They had a painted horse showing the skeletal system,

and the other side showed the muscular system.

The school has two fistulated cows. Here's the girls with their gloves on getting ready to stick their hands into the stomach of a fistulated cow.

A fistulated cow is a cow that has a hole surgically made so that the stomach can be accessed, while the cow remains alive. They said that the cow feels just fine - and she did look quite healthy. She just chewed her grass the whole time.

Don't worry, I won't show you those pictures. But this is the cow. She was quite fine.

Even I did this - because how many times in your life are you going to get an opportunity to stick your hand into a cow's stomach and touch the grass that she was currently digesting. It was gross and kinda cool at the same time.

After the tour, we stopped at the Texas A&M Bonfire Memorial. It was quite a nice tribute to the twelve people that lost their lives.

It was a very nice trip, I think the girls really had a good time.

We still had to drive 4 hours to get home, so it was quite a long day, but it was all worth it. I could really use another weekend to recover from this super busy one.