I Want to Stay in Here With You!

Yaks has almost got this picture book memorized. It's pretty funny to listen to him "read" it. He even mimics the inflections in my voice."I weeow go into duh zoo. I wan to sthee it, yesth, I do!"

We went to the Hogle Zoo on Thursday w/ the kids. Last year when we went to the zoo, the kids just wanted to slide down the snake slide in the kids' park. We could have done that for free at our neighborhood park, so I was hoping this year they would at least want to look at the animals!


The kids are full of questions these days. The most often asked in reference to each animal was, "What's he doing, Mom?" or "What does he want?" Poor animals. The answers to most of their questions were, "He's just walking around. He's just looking at you. He's just sitting." What do you say? Maybe I should have gotten a little creative, "He wants a drink from your sippy cup! She's coming to say hi to you. He wants to be your friend! She wants to eat you for lunch (just kidding! I didn't use that one)!"

The monkeys were active and friendly and came right up to the fence to say hi. The big cats were nowhere to be seen, except the cougar, who was pacing back and forth in his cage as though plotting his escape. The bears were eating something that looked like a huge turnip or celery stalk, and the kids thought that was awesome.
The elephants and the giraffes had their backs to us the whole time, and the penguins looked like they were searching the heavens for a ride to take them back to a colder climate. They'd seen better days. Speaking of escaping penguins. Check out this story about an escape attempt by a spider monkey in Michigan. "The zoo staff recaptured the adventurous monkey at a nearby boat dealership, where they found it perched atop a white and blue speedboat. "

We discovered the carousel and that you just need your ticket stub to ride, so the kids were pretty excited about that. We spent several minutes watching, to decide their favorite animal to ride. Boo settled on the Zebra, but Yaks - that kid could NOT make up his mind. I think he started on the anteater.

Then moved to the otter? Nope, let's go to something else.

He finally ended up on that polar bear in the picture above. Boo lost some of her nerve riding on the carousel, and insisted that I "hold" her the entire time. This is the reaction I got when my hand was removed to take a picture.

"MOM! You have to hold on to me!" What a face.
Look at the furrowed brow of panic!

When the ride was over, she complained that she wanted to ride the bear. Someone was acting like a BEAR and ready for a nap, I think.

It wouldn't be a true trip if we didn't lose something, and Boo managed that one for us, by wanting to remove her shoes while riding in the Chariot (our stroller). Well, sure enough, as we were about to go into the "small animal exhibit", we couldn't find her other pink croc. Woah, boy. Josh and I stood there, discussing where we last saw both shoes together, when this cute, young couple said, "Are you looking for a pink sandal? We totally saw it over by __________." We went looking there, but to no avail. We searched the entire zoo, then finally checked the lost and found and there it was.


Yaks took a little nap while Boo played (with her shoes on) on the playground. Apparently, there is a train there that you can ride around, which happened to be closed that day. I saw no less than five little boys crying like babies because the train wasn't running. Sometimes the zoo is a sad, sad place.

I took a potty break and asked Boo if she needed to go too (the kid hadn't gone almost six hours). She said no, but then about three minutes later, declared that "wet wets are gonna come out!" I didn't bring any sort of change in clothes for her, so this was serious business. We high-tailed it back to the bathroom for her to go, and we made it just in time. Potty training should be it's own zoo exhibit.