To the Zoo

Yesterday I woke up with an excess of energy (amazing) and Ellie woke up with a desire in her heart to be outside all day, shocker. Right after she ate breakfast she proceeded to undress herself, or as well as she could at least. Thank goodness she hasn't mastered the art of taking off her clothes yet. Once she does I fear we'll have a nudist in our midst. This is about as far as she got. Those dang sleeves can be so frustrating!

After we were dressed for the day she was begging to go outside. Sadly, we have the most boring back yard on the planet, so she never wants to stay back there. She had been playing with some mixing bowls the night before and they turned out to be (kind of) the perfect make-shift water table. Kind of. She was able to empty the bowls about every 5 minutes, but the 45 minutes of entertainment was worth it. Worth it enough actually that I found a cheap water table online that will hopefully be here right in time for it to rain this weekend, dang it.

After thoroughly saturating herself, we stripped her down and put her for a nap. Just as I was wondering what in the heck we were going to do with the rest of our day, my friend Heidi texted and asked if we wanted to go to the zoo. Thank heavens! A combo of animals, her buddy Holden, and all the outside she could dream of, what more could this Ellie bean ask for?

We were magically able to fit 3 car seats in the back seat of Heidi's truck. It was wonderful. We thought our days of driving together were over for a while. Sadly, it'll end again in September when our next one comes. I guess it will be time to get a bigger vehicle, right j.rue :)

We made it there with hardly and fuss, of course the second that we pulled into the parking lot all 3 kids read each other's minds and decided to start whining at the top of their lungs. We couldn't get them out and into their strollers fast enough. Once they were all sunblocked and hatted up, we were ready to go. Ellie is such a fly girl.

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I really just need to get her one of those animal backpack leashes because she was out of her stroller for a majority of the afternoon, and happy about it. It's just so nice to have your own personal pack mule that's not you, the mother. Ellie loved running around, and away from me through out the day. I relished in the moments when she would pause and hop on some sort of animal sculpture. She could have run around that place until the sun went down.

 

One of her favorite parts was watching the elephants. I say that because that's probably the longest she stopped to look at anything. We caught them doing tricks and she thought that was pretty neat, along with the sucker Heidi's mom had given her. 

Oh these two, that have the most interesting love/hate relationship. Holden loves to torment Ellie and Ellie loves to tattle on him by using her highest pitched squeal. She secretly loves it, I'm sure. We hit up the carousels next. You won't be able to tell by the pictures that Ellie loved it, but she did. She hopped animals about 10 times before we actually started. I wish she would show just the tiniest bit of emotion on new experiences, but like always, nothing.

 We finished up the trip with big soft serve cones and a train ride. Ellie showed more emotion for the ice cream. We headed home and two out of the three napped. Can I say again how much more fun driving together is? Driving separate removes the best conversations from the mix. Once we got home I threw together dinner while Ellie played with her water bowls again and then we finished off the night with a nice bath (for Ellie) and a later than usual bed time. J.rue's been working late this week and Ellie starts asking about him around 5:30 or so. It makes for a longer evening, but she sure is glad when daddy comes home. So am I.