Field Trip ~ June 14, 2012 ~ Natural Bridge Zoo

So I got pretty caught up on most my editing and other various work this week, so I decided to take the girls on a mini adventure. We convinced our favorite non-family/family member to go with us too! My seriously awesome babysitter Jamie, (not a typo-her name is Jamie too!) joined the girls and I on a trip down to the Natural Bridge Zoo. Only about an hour and a half drive from Harrisonburg, VA. The girls did awesome! Adelaide being only about 2 weeks into potty training had NO accidents! And Madelynn just sat back and enjoyed the ride. I have mixed feelings about zoos, on one hand they are super fun to take the kids to and we LOVE animals. However, on the other hand I can't help but to think ..... how lonely the elephant was, or why in the world would you have these gorgeous tigers pacing around in a cage. Anyhow, I tried to just enjoy the time without getting to wrapped up into my crazy views about wild animals in any sort of captivity. And I won't really harp on the fact that they were charging $50 to have your picture taken with a baby tiger. Or how the baby tigers' caretaker explained to me how caring for the baby tigers was just like caring for a newborn baby. Um....yeah, okay. 


Anyhow, it was a super fun day and I LOVE getting out with my girls. Plus it was a bonus day because we got to hang out with Jamie too. I think it was a unanimous decision that the giraffes were our favorite animal at the zoo. They had six of them and they would eat right out of your hand! *enter small anxiety moment*  I probably should have mentioned earlier that I have watched too many shows on Animal Planet, namely the show Fatal Attractions, to really have any sort of trust in any wild animals. (if you don't know what I am talking about, you can read up on it here)  I don't care how long they have lived in captivity they are still wild, they should be respected and still handled with caution.

Fortunately we had no devastating casualties, one bitten hand and Adelaide simply said..."Mommy, he bite me!" She is one tough little kid, no tears and still just as ready and willing to feed the next group of overly anxious eaters. After just a little over an hour of pushing the stroller through what seemed like quicksand (yes, I am out of shape) we were a little sun kissed and hungry. So we said bye to the 3 little baby tigers and headed off to find lunch. Obviously when we passed Pink Cadillac Diner Jamie and I both knew it was the lunch spot. It was packed....we had no idea we had just hit the jackpot of tacky diners (it was awesome). The walls were strewn with obnoxious Elvis memorabilia and there was a counter with milkshakes and everything. We settled on some standard diner grub and left with full bellies and tired kiddos. In my book that's success!

It's days like this that really make being able to be around my children and doing super fun things with them, such a reward. I mean don't get me wrong there are days that I want to pull my hair out, the days that I have changed 18 diapers in just a short span of a half hour (enter sarcasm), or when I can't seem to squeeze one more drop out of the infants Tylenol bottle because Madelynn seems to be teething every other day. Yeah those days aren't really that amazing. I am not going to sit here and pretend that life is a blissful fairy tale and my kid's are angels. The point is that days like today at the zoo, when Adelaide said "Mommy this is the BEST day EVER!!" simply puts everything in more of a perspective and the bad days don't seem so bad after all. So I revel in the good days like this where a trip to the zoo with hardly any tears and the same pair of underwear returning in the car ride home. For a minute there I thought I was in a dreamland, where all kids peed in the potty and Daddies always emptied the dishwasher (without being asked). Then I got home. But for that one moment it was a utopia and I realized why I do what I do. To be around my children as much as possible.  To photograph the good times and laugh later about the bad. It was that one little moment that made everything else trivial. Here are some photos from our awesome day at the zoo!

Jamie feeding giraffe...awesome!