Our Trip To The Zoo

Friday mom and I took the girls to the zoo. It was a beautiful, windy Kansas day. The zoo was busy, but not nearly as busy as when poor Danielle took her kiddos on Thursday.

That morning Melanie just wanted to play with her car, so to get her on a different train of thought I told her we were going with Grandma to the zoo to see the ducks, cows and monkeys (thinking this array of animals would be the most likely to get her attention based on the books we have). She totally honed in on the "ducks" and wouldn't talk about anything else to the point that when I said it was time to get in the car to go her response was "No car. Ducks!" with a rather worried look on her face. I had to differentiate between her car and mommy's van. I never thought I'd see the day that she didn't want to play in her car...

Claire on her first trip to the zoo.

She sure looked cute!
(Even if she slept basically the whole time we were there)

The first stop was the American Farm petting zoo, where I thought it would be fun to let Melanie feed the animals.

Word of advice: Get the animal feed from one of the dispensers outside the petting area. Those goats are smart and know what it means when you go over to the feed dispenser and will butt you out of the way to get the food out on their own!

So we left the overly aggressive goats to munch on the feed on their own and went to the other part of the petting zoo to feed the sheep. Melanie was a bit intimidated by the animals, so we decided to keep a fence between us and them this time around.

The first momma duck and her babies we came across

Here's Melanie getting a better view of the ducks, which was the only thing she was really interested in at all. At almost every exhibit we went to I would tell her what it was and try to get her interested in it and her response would be "No, Duck!"

Finally getting to feed the ducks!
She was absolutely thrilled.

The family of ducks we fed.
(So I realize they're actually geese, but for the sake of simplicity, and to make it more pronounceable for Melanie,we called them ducks)
It's almost like feeding the ducks was her mission at the zoo, because she was more interested in the other things once we had finished feeding them. Mission accomplished!

I'm awake now and I'm hungry! Time to go home!

(or at least to the car, I'm not picky about where you feed me!)

Overall a good trip to the zoo. I hope to take the girls pretty regularly this summer to take advantage of our zoo membership. What a wonderful activity to have available to us! Now to remember to always be fully stocked with quarters for the duck food dispensers...