Summer Trip to the Zoo

I took the kids to the zoo today, as the weather was nice and we had some free time.  The food is not cheap there, so we try to bring a picnic lunch when we can.

Our first stop was the ape and monkey section.  The mama orangutan had recently had a baby.  The kids were very interested to see, and you can see why, as look how adorable that little thing is.

Joshua's recent increased interest in snakes made him much more interested in this albino python than the last time we were here.

Clara was excited to get a map, and she wanted to be the navigator.  But that mostly consisted of her staring at the map with a confused look on her face before finally declaring, "We need to go there!" and then she'd point somewhere on the map that may or may not have been a random spot she chose.  Either way, it wasn't helpful, but that's okay.  Hannah agreed to push her in the stroller, which was surprising to me.  She couldn't see over the stroller, so she drove Clara around like a blind person might drive a car.  So we ended up with Hannah blindly steering the stroller while Clara confidently told her where they should go to get to the next place, even though she didn't even know where we were supposed to go. 

The zoo stole our favorite polar bear from us and sent him to a zoo in North Carolina (thankfully for Nikita, it wasn't the Cincinnati Zoo, so he doesn't have to worry about getting Harambe'd).  In exchange, we now have a couple of koalas.  Most people say they are always sleeping and never available to see, so I suppose we got lucky today, as both were awake and visible.  Here is a cute-ish koala looking at us.  I'd still rather have Nikita.

                                              We successfully found both Nemo and Dory in this tank.  

And we went to the penguin house, because penguins are awesome (and not just the hockey team).  All three kids liked watching them, though Hannah did so from the comfort of the stroller.  They asked to ride on the carousel before we left, but we didn't have time.  When I got home, Meghan told me that they were really looking forward to that based on a conversation she'd had with them earlier in the day.  But it didn't seem to be too big of a deal when we were there.  Still, I'll prioritize it for next time.