When Ewan was born he ‘brought’ with him a family gift of a zoo membership, so that expired this July as he was born in July! The kids and I made one last trip down to the zoo together to enjoy all it had to offer. We spent the whole day there from opening till almost closing and still didn’t quite see everything! First off we learned that Ewan uses the word ‘woof’ to mean more than just dogs, because they don’t have dogs at the zoo and he said ‘woof’ for a few of them. He was also very impressed with the giraffes.

If I could have interpreted his baby language it would be ‘wow look at THAT THING! hey look dirt down here!’ Josie and Celia love to scamper all over the climbing structures that abound. Ewan was also suitable impressed with a kangaroo that looked like it was just showing off for us, hoping back and forth super fast. Ewan tried to jump like him, not a skill he’s mastered yet.

Then they played in the dirt some more, then we fed the budgee’s. No pictures here because I was trying to keep Celia from freaking out about the birds flying down and trying to land on us. You’d think someone had shown her Hitchcock. We bought some food to feed the birds who then flew right down to my hand and ate it. I was carrying Ewan on the front at the time so he made a few grabs for a bird and a few of the birds considered landed on him to see if he had food too. Celia was too scared but Josie tried a little but didn’t like the feel of the birds nails on her. Ewan and I thought they were pretty cool. I easily had six little birds on my hand and arms at a time, so cute.

We had a picnic lunch. Celia fell (not far) out of the tree and landed on a rock on her bum, ouch. Then we headed over to the Gorillas who were very sleepy at this post-lunch-time. Ewan managed to make the big one smile, and lots of other people watching the gorillas smile as he ran around and hid from me.

And here’s a realistic picture of what really happens when I try to photograph them. Celia hides, Ewan makes faces, and Josie doesn’t stop talking.

In this case, while it was a nice location, the photo just wasn’t worth it as they were not in the mood. Mostly they wanted to play with sticks and dirt.

Next we went to see the flamingos. Celia thought they looked thirsty I guess, and dropped her water bottle into their enclosure. Oops. And the dang thing has our name on it so the zoo people could track us down if they wanted to. Not like there are any more than five people in the world with our last name! Thankfully it didn’t actually fall into the birds, just the space around them.

We saw more birds, and more stuff that people dropped into the enclosures, sunglasses, pencils and such. Then headed back to the gorilla statue that had been monopolized by camps earlier in the day and got another mom to snap one of us.

Celia couldn’t manage to look away from the impending camp group coming toward us, we had been dodging the many groups all day as they were loud and rambunctious. Then she fell down the statue. Poor kid had a rough day.

After a nice recharging snack we went through the barnyard and finally I let them go to the massive giant expansive playground. I had been avoiding it because once they were there no way were they going to do anything else. It was so late the camps had finally cleared out though so it wasn’t super busy and I felt comfortable letting my eyes off of Celia and Josie once they promised to stay together. Ewan thought the place was fantastic and I chased him around for a while till it was time to head home or risk sitting in insane amounts of traffic. Plus Ewan hadn’t napped since the drive over, and he definitely needed to nap again. One more picture by a stroke of luck they were all looking. It was an exhausting but great final trip to the zoo for this years membership!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2014 at 9:17 pm by Jen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.