Monday, June 15, 2009

At the Zoo

Remember when I went to the zoo with Noah's pre-school last month? I forgot that I hadn't posted any of the pictures until I was looking through them again this morning and came upon these. As you can plainly see, Noah still has what I like to think is a passing fancy for a certain anatomical feature. When he saw this statue, he ran over to it and yelled "He has boo-boos!" He then reported that to everybody within earshot about a dozen more times while I tried to get just one picture of him not fondling the gorilla. As you can see, I failed.

I am not a zoo person. I don't like them at all, but not for reasons that you might think. The strong odors and the crowds don't really bother me, but I really hate to see animals caged up. Even though zoos these days seem to take pride in the ability to create more natural habitats for the animals, I'm not fooled. I know that in nature giraffes don't live in houses with really tall and skinny garage doors like our zoo has. I also know that all the trees that they can cram into a monkey room don't make up for the glass walls that are also there. Zoos just make me uncomfortable and sad. But, I decided that Noah needed a zoo experience and I was willing to put my issues aside to take him.

The morning was complicated by the fact that although my camera bag was crammed with three sets of "back-up" batteries (just in case), I had brought not a single memory card for the camera. I discovered that fact when we arrived at the front gate and I tried to get a picture of the kids by the fountain. Needless to say, there was no point in packing the camera bag around all day, so I took it back to the car and we entered the gates. After an hour of wandering and being bugged at myself, I finally decided that I couldn't spend the day at the zoo and not take a single picture. So, we broke from the rest of the group and left to buy a memory card. About 90 minutes and lots of frustrating moments later, we pulled back into the parking lot and the real fun began.

I won't relive every moment, but the re-cap that Noah gave to Phil that night went something like this (this is as close to the conversation as I can get from a month old memory):

Phil: How was the zoo?
Noah: Good.
Phil: Did you see monkeys?
Noah: No.
Phil: Did you see elephants
Noah: No.
Phil: Did you see bears?
Noah: No.
Phil: Did you see giraffes?
Noah: No.
Phil: Did you see birds?
Noah: No.
Phil: Did you see tigers?
Noah: No.
Phil: What did you see?
Noah: Nuffin.
Phil: I'm not sure where mom took you, but it sounds like a pretty crappy zoo.
Noah: Yeah.

Me: Thanks, Noah. Glad I was able to provide such a great memory for you at the zoo.

Just so you know, I didn't take Noah to an empty park and tell him it was the zoo. Luckily, I had a brand new memory card that allowed me to gather some pictorial evidence of our day.



1 comments:

Nathan said...

I love that you couldn't even get one picture without his hand feeling the gorilla up.

The contrast of his friend on the other side who looks identical in every picture makes it even funnier.

Of course, we all know how well behaved that family is ... (this is me, trying not to be jealous)