Nothing says fun like sticking your hand in a cow's stomach!

Disclaimer--If you have a queasy stomach, proceed with caution.  I have pictures of animal organs and talk about said organs.  Don't say I didn't warn you!

It pays to have friends who have lived in this city all their lives.  Why?  Because they know about all the cool things going on that you normally wouldn't have any idea about.  Yesterday the cool thing was the LSU vet school having their annual open house.  Now normally I would ignore this information because I'm not exactly looking for information about a vet school.  But because this cool friend knew about it she informed me that they actually had a lot of cool things that the kids would love and it was free.  We had no other plans so after looking online to get us exact directions so that we wouldn't get lost in the downtown/college area we took off and met our friends.

The very first room we went in showed several different hearts of animals.  One was a dog's heart.  With heart worms in it.  I've heard a lot about heart worms, but haven't really spent a lot of time of what they might actually look like.  If you are like me, allow me to enlighten you.  They are really skinny worms whose larva are delivered through a mosquito bite that make their way through a dog's body, into his heart and then begin to grow.  The heart that they showed looked like an organ with angel hair spaghetti in it.  It was gross.  My wonderful friend has informed me that she got a picture of all our girls looking at the heart with much interest and I'm in the background horrified.  When she puts in on her blog I will provide a link.  It was gross.

Here our girls are playing with cow and dog eyeballs.  Again, gross.  But being the good mother that I am when #4 wanted to touch one I put a glove on her and held her up so she could hold one.  And being the mean mother that I am I made #1 pick it up again so I could take a picture when she was clearly horrified to be touching it.  What can I say, she needed some more science.

This is all #3 wanted to have with the eyeballs.

Another fun room was where they had two cows set up with a hole in their side that you could stick your hand into its stomach.  #2's face pretty much sums it up.  Never one to pass up a learning experience, I asked the people there why the cows had holes in their stomachs.  I figured they had to do surgery because they were sick.  Turns out they do it because if they have another sick cow come in they can take the digested food out of these cow's stomachs and give it to the sick cows and it supposedly has the right amount of bacteria and nutrition to help the sick cow get better.  See how educational this day was?  And just in case you're wondering, the girls didn't actually touch anything in the stomach.  I however looked inside it and it wasn't gross or slimy.  It looked like a barrel full of mulched alfalfa.  The smell was pretty bad though.

Can't have a vet school open house without some cute baby animals to pet.  And let me tell you, those vet school students were so excited to be holding these animals so all the crazy children could go by in a line and pet them. 

Last, but in no way least, the heart and lung of a cow.  But it isn't just any old lung laying there on a table.  Oh no, they have it hooked up to a machine that makes it move like air is going in and out of it.  #4 had to touch it.  She was fearless and wanted to touch everything all day.  I'm pretty sure #1 and #2 touched it as well.  This was the only organ I touched.  It was actually very soft and squishy.  And yes, squishy is a scientific word.  I know because the vet student used it to describe the lung while trying to convince me to touch it!

All in all, it was a really fun day.  Now that I'm in the know, we'll make sure and go back every year!