To Zoo or not to Zoo

Today, I took the girls to the zoo. It was 75 degrees, spring break (no school), and just beautiful. I really have no idea what I was thinking, more than probably, I was not. The Oklahoma City Zoo is a really good zoo. We go there a lot, but I usually try to go during the week when kids are in school and early in the day so that it isn't very busy. Today the parking lot was overflowing into the Omniplex (science museum next door) parking lot - yes, this was about 9:30 am. By the time we left there at around 11:30 there was just no place left to park. So the traffic was bad, foot traffic even worse, especially when you consider all the strollers and wagons and the 3-5 trolleys they have running on busy days. Wow. We were surfing a raging tide of people, me, my 24 week pregnant belly, a 2.5 year old and a 4.5 year old. I try to get them to hold my hand (they usually don't have to at the zoo because we go when no one is there). They were actually pretty good about it. The problem with that is Zoe walks really fast and wants to move on quickly and Sydney lags behind and want to stay a while at each thing and take it all in. So I was torn in two most of the morning. Every time one of them let go of my hand they tried to get run over by some bigger person (or flood of them) or stopped paying attention and just walked right off with a different family! Yikes - Mommy has a heart attack. Oh well. Despite the craziness and utter exhaustion it wasn't a bad trip. Sadly our elephants are in Tulsa on a mating program for two years (it still bums the kids out when they aren't there). However, there is now a cool Dinosaur exhibit set up in a back corner area. We were lucky to see a whole lot of cats (which for some reason we rarely do) but there were very few "monkeys" only one orangutan playing in a refrigerator box. The Dino exhibit was really cool. I wish we had gotten to it before I was so worn out (kids too) they had life size animatronic dinos whose heads and arms and tails moved. T-rex made Syd a little nervous. Zoe is really into dinosaurs and could hardly decide which thing to look at first. There were some other cool things set up for kids, but because we were tired and felt like sardines in the little tent, we hurried on. On the last leg of out trip (walking as quick as possible by every hooved creature on the way to the car and bypassing completely a few of our favorite animals- bears, alligators, wolves, and the aquatic area...) Sydney fell and scraped up her elbow. It was bloody, though not too bad, but it has been the story of the day since. She has discovered bandaids (which never fit well on elbows) and there is always some big to do about any small injury. In any case I think it might be possible that they are now napping (or just being very quiet for a couple of minutes - you never can say for sure and I don't plan on disturbing them by checking). So here are a couple of pictures. Enjoy.