Zoo Doings

Today Craig and Collin were scheduled to arrive home after a week of helping at a local camp. Craig tends to be a little, um, grouchy, when he gets back, largely due to a lack of sleep the previous nights. Past experience has taught me that it's better to get out of the house on the day camp ends. Therefore, I loaded up Cami, Evan and Grandma into the van and we headed to a zoo in Sioux Falls.

While at the zoo, we viewed the usual array of animals. We also rode the merry-go-round and the train. Evan ate a $2.50 ice cream bar. We strolled through the Asian section of the zoo. We also entered Africa where we learned that giraffes only sleep about 35 minutes in a 24 hour period and that this 35 minutes is broken up into several short naps (sounds like a newborn at night). We passed on the $5.00 camel rides. Evan fed the ducks. Grandma warned us not to touch any of the animals in the petting zoo or we might get fatal diseases- so we only looked. We saw the reindeer baking in the 80 degree temps. Cami was absolutely fascinated with all the animals. Evan was a little trooper and only complained once about all the walking he had to do.

We then returned to the parking lot. Somewhere along our zoo treck, Cami lost her happy meal toy she got from McD's. We didn't know this until we got to the van and we didn't exactly want to retrace our steps through the zoo. Evan had the exact same happy meal toy, which Cami wanted, of course. Evan wasn't willing to share his new toy, so you can only imagine the shrieking that occurred in the van. Evan had to go potty before we left, so against my better judgment, I told him to use the mulch bed in front of our parked vehicle. We were in a far part of the parking lot and he was shielded from public view by the van on one side and a tree on the other. A quick scan of the lot showed me that no one else was walking nearby. Evan pulled his pants down and it was then that he said, "Mommy, that man is looking at me." Sure enough, the one other person in the entire parking lot happened to be parked next to us on the passenger side. He also happened to have his windows rolled down. Thus, he had heard me instruct Evan to pee in the mulch, saw Evan's bareness and was probably wondering what kind of weird mother I was. After that moment, loading up the van seemed to take an eternity since I couldn't get out of there soon enough.

The kids fell asleep on the way home and the rest of the trip was uneventful.