Trip to the zoo

Today I took a personal day off of work. Jamie had a job interview near the St. Louis airport, and rather than have the kids in daycare all day we decided to just make a family day out of it and go together, then go to zoo (which we've wanted to do all year). We left by 6 am and drove to St. Louis. I dropped Jamie off at a hotel where he was to have his interview, and I took the kids for breakfast at Ihop. They loved the pancakes, and within an hour we picked Papi up and headed toward the zoo. It was a chilly and sort of drizzly day, but thankfully it wasn't very wet by the time we got there. As we suspected, we had the zoo nearly to ourselves. We took the wagon, but the kids got to get out and walk around a bit because there were so few other people there. We took a ride on the little train that goes around the zoo. We did get to see four tiger cubs playing, but that was it for animals on the train ride... so that was pretty much a bust. We didn't see a ton of animals, partly because some of them were inside and partly because we didn't spent a whole lot of time at the zoo. Asher absolutely loved the bears. He actually squealed when he saw them. He also trumpeted at the elephants entirely without prompting from us. Avery was interested in everything, and especially loved the big beetle she got to crawl on. We got her face painted and of course she didn't choose a cute little animal...she wanted a shark! That's my girl. We actually timed it perfectly, as the kids were *just* starting to get worn out when we were leaving. By the time we started heading west, they were both sleeping in the car. It was a good day!