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the zoo blew
We went to the San Diego Zoo yesterday. This trip had been planned for months and months. I was so excited to go. Baby Bug and I read about animals in her books all the time. I thought this would be the cat’s pajamas for her to see real live “oooh oooh aaah aaah’s” (monkeys) and giraffes and lions and tigers and bears. Oh my! It would be just like Disneyland except not so fake and probably not as crowded. Sounds like fun!
Well, I was wrong. The Zoo stank. Don’t misunderstand me though, I love the zoo and I think the zoo is super fun. It’s just not so fun for one-year-olds. One-year-olds don’t like looking at cages with sleeping animals. They’d rather play with the wire fencing or pick leaves off the ground or examine dried chewing gum stuck under the bottom of railings. Anything but look at the boring animals.
I don’t know why I forgot that animals sleep all the time when you’re at the zoo because I remember clearly being very disappointed about the exact same thing when I was a young excited eight-year-old. When you go to the zoo, all the animals sleep. That’s all they do. And if they’re not sleeping then they are leaning up a against a wall looking depressed.
The worst is when you walk all the way over to the other side of the park, all excited to see some polar bears “plunging” into icy cold water and playing with rubber balls and eating fish… and when you get there, NOTHING. Nada. Zip! The polar bears are sleeping! Even worse, they’re hiding in their caves sleeping so you can’t even look at their sad yellow fur!
I turned to Toby and said, “I remember, the last time we were at the zoo, making a mental note to go straight to the polar bear exhibit in the morning because that’s when they’re up doing things.”
(We got to the zoo at two, a very sad and pathetic time to get there considering they close at four.)
Toby said, “I remember making a mental note to skip the polar bears all together.”
Hmph! So why did we both forget our mental notes and cart a squirmy impatient and very bored one-year-old with us all the way over to the other side of the park to see the icy blue polar bear pool with no polar bears in it? I have no idea.
I think it’s parental amnesia or something. Just like we somehow forgot that we are on a budget and we weren’t supposed to buy Baby Bug any stuffed animals. She needs more stuffed animals like a hole in her head.
All in all, I do think the zoo was fun. We just had to do it at our own pace. We had to lower our expectations. So what if we just look at hoofed animals and birds, that’s okay. How many little goats and deer can there be anyway? A LOT. Sheesh! I think every little goat and small deer in the world is represented along the “Horn and Hoof Mesa.”
Baby Bug did like the fish in the Rain Forest Aviary and I got a kick out of the orangutans. You can get right up close to them and pretend to scratch their hairy backs. But they did look a bit depressed. Zoo’s can be so sad sometimes, even an excellent zoo like the San Diego Zoo.
I would definitely go again but I think it will be way way way more fun when Baby Bug is three or even five. I think she’s just as happy playing in the park with leaves and grass as she is looking at giant giraffe heads coming at her. I think the best part of the zoo for her was just spending time with both her mom and dad. Even though Toby is at home every day and she plays with him every day, it’s very rare that we spend the day hanging out together just for fun. I say, lets do more of that.
This is not the pesty post. I’m still simmering on that one.
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a catch up post
What was I going to blog about the other day? See, this is why you should never put off writing a post (or writing a letter or whatever you might be writing) until later. When later comes around, you’ve always completely forgotten what you wanted to say. This happens to me all the time. I always think my most brilliant thoughts when I’m in the shower right after I’ve had my morning cup of coffee. Probably because caffeine is like LSD for me. My brain thinks up a million amazing things while on it but then when it wears off, I’m like cold toast. Wha… Um…. What? What was that brilliant thing I was thinking the other day?
Who knows what I was going to say, but these are some of the one-hundred-and-one pictures Toby and I took the other day. Toby actually said, “This kid won’t let me put the camera down.” As in, the cuteness, the cuteness! Please stop being so cute so we can stop taking pictures! I know we’re her parents and we automatically think she’s cute no matter what she looks like… but man! I am more in love with my child than I ever thought I would be. She just keeps getting cuter every day!!! What am I going to do! Flickr owns me. They could jack up their price for photo hosting some ten years from now and I would just have to sell my house (assuming I have house in ten years) to be able to afford to buy all my pictures back from them. Good thing I’m backing them up in other places too. Can you imagine?
Enough gushing already. If I’m not complaining, then I’m going on an on about my kid. But seriously, remember Four-Month-Old-Baby-Bug? Pfffft! I thought that was cute? Four-Month-Old-Baby-Bug has nothing on One-Year-Old-Baby-Bug.
I was going to tell you how Baby Bug loves her ladybug ball. She loves it a lot. What I love to do is: hold her under her armpits and walk her around the living room floor, kicking the ball. If she can’t get a good kick in (which is most the time), I hold her foot for her and give the ball a solid smack. When her foot contacts the ball I say, “Boof!” really loud. Oh the peels of gleeful giggling that follow! It’s the BEST. I could probably save lives if I could just put that sound in a jar and walk it around dying sick people. We play this game all day sometimes.
It’s probably way too early to tell but Baby Bug seems to be way more athletically inclined than I am. At least she’s way more interested in balls, kids playing with balls and watching soccer on television than I ever was. Which is pretty easy since I can’t catch or hit a ball to save my life and I’ve never ever watched sports on tv voluntarily.
Toby’s family is somewhat athletic. He and his brothers are all smaller than average but extremely light, wiry and muscly. Toby can hike up mountains faster than I can even if I train for a year. I wonder what he could do if he never smoked. His brother almost went to the olympics for gymnastics. The pommel horse, I think.
I’m hoping that Baby Bug is inheriting Toby’s body type and athleticism with her small under-weightedness and it’s not because I don’t feed her enough. Man, I worry about that every day. Sometimes I wonder if she would be big and chubby if I had fed her formula instead of breast milk. These are the things that would keep me up at night if I wasn’t so dead tired all the time.
How did I get on this tangent? I wanted to tell you how Baby Bug carried her ladybug ball all the way to the beach the other day. Of course she dropped it once and it rolled into the highway and got run over by a mini van, TWICE. Front tire and back tire. Amazingly, the little ball didn’t pop but stayed there bouncing in the middle of traffic.
It was horrifying. Baby Bug and I just watched it with eyes popping out of our heads and mouths hanging wide open. Thankfully, it happened in an intersection and right when the light turned green. The car nearest us, saw everything and stayed stopped for us. They motioned me to run out into the street in front of them and rescue the poor ball. I was so thankful. I can only imagine the heart break that was going on inside Baby Bug’s little chest. After that, I carried the ball in my giant purse.
This has nothing to do with anything but while we were at the beach playing “boof” with the ball, we saw the strangest thing. There was a man (dressed in running shorts and running shoes) and a young boy (dressed in a wet suit top, shorts and bare feet) running up and down the beach. Every few steps they would stop and the man would pull a pair of scissors out of his pocket and start cutting the boy’s hair. Sometimes the boy would struggle. Other times he would just gaze out at the gray sky over the ocean. Other times he would grab handfuls of sea weed laying on the sand and start chomping on it. It was the strangest thing I have ever seen.
When I caught up to the man and boy, I was overcome with curiosity so I asked him if he gave haircuts on the beach often. He laughed and explained that his nephew was autistic and this was the only way he could cut his hair with out him freaking out. Then he went onto explain that it was risky business cutting kid’s hair in public because last year someone reported him to the police because they thought he was a kidnapper. Apparently, cutting a kid’s hair is one of the first things a kidnapper will do. I had no idea. It’s amazing the things you learn when you talk to perfect strangers. I left the scene holding extra tight to baby bug and feeling a little unsettled inside.
Since I don’t want to close leaving you feeling unsettled inside too, I’ll cheer you up with some funny pictures of Baby Bug sitting on Pounce. This is proof that the cats are doing just fine since she has joined our family.
It’s also proof that Pounce is best cat in whole wide world.
