The Zoo, Take Two

The weekend of my birthday (known to the rest of America as Labor Day weekend) we decided to finally go to the zoo as a family. We have attempted the trip two other times in the past month, but both times we failed to actually make it to the zoo. Ellie and I went to the zoo back in May with Grandma, Grandpa, her aunts and her cuzzy, but I was so happy to finally be able to go and experience the joys of the zoo with just Daddy and Ellie. It has been quite a while since Brad last went. Brad seems to think the last time he went to the zoo was on a field trip in elementary school. He has only poor memories of that sad journey. His room mother chaperon decided it was important to first see the insects and snakes (probably because it wasn't crowded there), and after that, they had to go eat lunch and head home. He was a little bitter then, and is still a little bitter now. But he had loads of fun on our trip last week, so I guess the zoo experience has been redeemed to some extent. Ellie loved the zoo again this time. She had so much fun seeing the elephants, giraffes, and rhinos, but we think her favorite part of the zoo was probably the elephant slide. Yep. All those cool animals, and she just had a smile from ear to ear going up and down that silly little elephant slide time after time after time. Brad's favorite part of the zoo was just spending time with his girls. I agree with him. I just had fun being with my two favorite people.

Here's our sweet Ellie enjoying the amazingly exciting elephant slide

Ellie had to experience all aspects of the zoo, including all of the flowers and weeds along the path. She is so cute. Any time she see a flower, whether it be a real flower, a silk flower, a picture of a flower, or a weed that has some semblance of a flower, she has to smell it. So of course she had to do this with all the "flowers" seen with our strolling about zoo too.

She though the rhinos were quite interesting. She likes to point to their horns in books, so she pointed to the horn on the statue too.

I don't think she really trust this gorilla next to her.