Thursday, August 19, 2010

Animals and All That Jazz

231/365

Why are we crazy? My friend Kathleen and I packed up the kids and took them to the zoo after naps, for their final summer offering of Animals and All That Jazz, where they stay open late, have a jazz band come in and play, serve dinner ($$) and let the kids play. And for some reason we opted to do this on the one night this week where it actually got hotter after naps rather than cooler. I've wanted to go Fiercely, and been unable to swing it all summer, and people (and I mean my family) need to learn to not argue with me when I want to do something. Tonight, No One could argue with me, I MADE the kids get in that car. I was going to make them go and enjoy themselves, darn it.

And they did.

Eventually. We arrived, and first thing we rode on the carousel, the rides were free for members. Sam was streaming audio, just screaming whenever I tried to set him on an animal, so he just rode in my arms while I stood, and though Chris initially bawked, even he had to admit he had a good time riding a Lion.



Chris told me all he wanted to do was "See Goats" so I made sure after we rode the carousel, we ran over to goats to say hi. We couldn't go into the petting area, but they were out and coming up to the fence in a most sociable way. That made Chris happy.



I let Sam get out and meet them too. You can't see, but he was Smiling HUGE at these goats, that let him pet them. I totally thought he was going to get nipped, (Who wouldn't want a taste of that chubby little hand?) but he didn't.



As we were headed out of the petting zoo area (after all the animals were surrenduring for the evening and the employees were booting us out) we met Kapura (sp?) the lion, who was pretty happy to just dance with Emily.



We circled around a bit to see if any other animals were available for viewing, but they had called it a night. We walked by the band. The music was very nice, relaxing like, but nothing I couldn't walk away from. Sam was VERY INTERESTED in the drum set.



We ended up on the other side of the band, near where the lemurs would be if they hadn't gone to bed too, and had our small supper we'd packed. There were a couple perisistent bees that made trouble, but not too bad. After the elder kids had finished supper, Chris started bugging me to go play on the playground which he could see. I had sworn I would NEVER let him do the playground at the zoo, because as I tell him, "We don't come to the zoo to play at the playground, we come to see the animals." But the animals were gone, it was still pretty light out, and he'd eaten his sandwich, and as Kathleen ever so wisely put it, Chris asks every time we come anyway, so he isn't going to ask any MORE than that. So what the heck...



I caved and let him play at the playground. His departure meltdown was mild compared to the one I got when I told him I wanted to Take him to the zoo. So... Success!

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