Last Sunday we took the boys to the Children’s Discovery Zoo near our house. They have their fall fun festival going on right now and since it’s only fifteen minutes from our house we decided to check it out. I am so glad that we did.
They had scarecrows manning two of these chairs just outside the entrance. We tried getting Adam to pose with Luke, but he was not at all interested. Poor Luke didn’t have a choice – doesn’t he look thrilled?
That penguin costume was originally going to be worn by Adam for his first Halloween, but then I found a dinosaur costume I loved and he wore that instead (spoiler alert – Luke’s going to be wearing the dino for his first Halloween too). The penguin is made of fleece and is really cozy, so it kept him nice and warm. Plus Luke is the most adorable penguin (even grumpy) ever.
They had a lot of different animals for the kids to interact with – some you could feed or pet. Adam was a little leery of the goats and tended to keep his distance from most of the bigger animals. They had ponies, sheep, chickens (Adam is waving to one of them in the picture above – that was as close as he would get), llamas, alpacas, peacocks, wolves, and a bunch of other animals.
He wasn’t at all shy around the bunnies though. I think he would have been content to sit and watch them all afternoon. They had two pens of rabbits – there were two in this one and they were the “big bunny rabbits” according to Adam.
These little ones were his favorite though. There were so many of them (you know what they say about rabbits) that there were always some hopping around. One of the workers picked one up for Adam to pet while we were there. I may have had to stop him from trying to climb in there with the bunnies after that.
That same nice young man went and got a hedgehog to bring to Adam to pet as well. He wasn’t too sure of the spikes.
They also had a hayride where you could go see more animals, but it was too close to nap time and so we figured it was best to try that next year. In addition to the animals there were all sorts of vehicles for the kids to ride around on – it was pretty muddy though, so he didn’t go too far.
We took a bunch of pictures of Adam in the ball pit and in every one he has such a serious look on his face. He loved it though and even played a game where he would fight his way through the ball to give me a kiss through the net and then go back a couple of steps, turn, and do it all again. At one point he was completely covered by the balls and I was terrified that he was going to flip out and I was going to have to rock-paper-scissors Dave to see who had to go in after him. He loved it though and thought it was hilarious to hide on me.
We spent quite a bit of time in this area as well. Those tables were filled with some sort of grain and were the perfect height for Adam. He had a blast filling the containers and transfering the contents from one to another.
Dave even got in on the fun; I was busy holding a sleeping Luke. Adam did bring me a couple of cups of grain though.
They only way we were able to get Adam away from the grain table was to tell him he could paint a pumpkin.
I think we’ll be painting one or two of his little pumpkins that he got on Saturday later this week. He really enjoyed it.
It really was a great way to spend the afternoon. I’m so glad that Dave suggested going.