The June 12th School Trip to the Zoo

Last year I chaperoned YaYa's K5 trip to the zoo. This year Lisa was picked to chaperone for her, while I pulled duty with LuLu's K4 class. This had the unfortunate side effect of preventing us from attending Smiley's 1st ever year-end school picnic, scheduled on the same day. Thankfully my mother-in-law picked up the slack and took him, and I owe her (and Smiley) one.

Lisa and I had planned on linking up at the zoo and merging our two groups, but alas K4 was told to stick together. I had five kids, including LuLu, under my watch. We went the opposite way of everyone else and hit the kids 'family farm' area first.

True fact: cows are prone to swallowing nails and other metal objects mixed in with grass. To prevent that from doing damage they are intenionally given a magnet to swallow, one that sucks up all the nails before they do harm.

4 million animals and the kids reacted the most to seeing a playset to attack.

Then finally, on to some animals.

Then, on to a snack.

We took the snack break on a patio with a gorgeous view of a pond.

A peacock wandered onto the deck and the kids gave (polite) chase from a distance.

We bumped into YaYa and Lisa and caught up on our activities. YaYa had gone on the overhead glider across the zoo and back, but K4 was prohibited (and rightly so, to my mind) from engaging in any activity that cost exra money.

We split up again and K4 had lunch. Then we went through the bat house, the reptile area, the monkeys and apes, the aquarium, etc. Suprisingly we actually had some learning experiences, as a snake was shedding its skin and there were dead mice hanging from a branch as a snack for another reptile.

Here's my group, plus a few hanger-on's.

I've tried hard not to post pictures of the animals because, as I told a mother there 'every year I come here, and every year I take the same pictures' and besides, if you want to see what a giraffe looks like, go hit wikipedia.

But somehow it'd escaped my notice that the flamingo's, which I remembered vividly from my youth, had been removed from the zoo in recent years. They were reintroduced this year, and I feel compelled to post a pic of them here.

By this point the kids were exhausted and fights errupted, so we hunkered down in a park-like area to rest. The adults did most of the resting, to be honest, while the kids played.

I do this gimmick where I put my palms out, encourage my kids to lock their elbows and put their palms on mine, and then I lift them in the air.  The trouble is, when I lifted Lu up in the park all the kids wanted to try it out, and my arms got the biggest workout in quite awhile.

I don't remember where we went after that, but I thought this was neat:

We headed back to the bus just in time, as tornado warning were again threatening the area and a storm was coming. We just barely missed the rain, as the sky's opened up as I was getting into my car in the school parking lot.

A good time. Exhausting, but fun.

Oh, yeah. At the zoo we only had one camera and I had it with me (remember, we were supposed to have been together all day) so all these shots are mine. But she did take some pics with her camera phone. For whatever reason they came out super small, so enlarging themt made 'em less than perfect. But they give you some idea of the fun the kids had with her.

Here's two I sent her in reply