A Day at the Zoo

We haven't really spent time at the zoo in quite awhile. Yesterday Jon and I took the kids to the zoo and ended up staying 5 hours. As we made the rounds looking at all the animals and playing in all the kiddie areas, we had an amazing time talking and laughing and trying to scare each other while visiting some of the creepier creatures. We attended a cute little show that had lots of fun animals, including a large vulture that flew down over the audience. Joe was really excited by how huge the Galapagos turtles were, and Joci and I really enjoyed the playful otters. We even encountered a special life lesson at the Babboon house when a male babboon finally caught his female, ahem. We even got to see our national icon, the Bald Eagle, two of them. The highlight of the day, though, was the Stingray Bay. There they have a huge pool of stingrays, sharks, and horseshoe crabs. Unfortunately, my camera's battery was too low to get those photos. It took a lot of convincing to get the kids to touch the stingrays as they would swim by. Then the attendant told us if we cupped our hand under the water, palm up, then the stingrays would think it was feeding time and suck on you hand. It was both surprising and yucky at the same time. Jon screamed like a little girl when two went for his hand at once. Then after we convinced Joe to do it, he got ambushed from the opposite direction of where he was looking and that completely freaked him out. He immediately said he had to pee, poor kid. Probably didn't help that Jon and I were doing everything we could not to laugh out loud at him.

At the end of the day we ordered a pizza and took it over to Mom and Dad's house so the kids could tell them all about the zoo while they were still on their zoo-high. Of course, the kids fell asleep in the car on the way home.