Hogle Zoo

Last weekend was rather boring, if only because Christopher was gone on a mountain biking trip with his friends to Moab again. But he came home with a prize: a splint. He fell and broke his hand, as the little blue arrow shows you here. Thank goodness it was their last ride of the weekend.




At least he isn't in a cast. The splint he can take on and off as needed, which is nice. It has been fun watching him to try and learn to do things with his left hand only. Poor guy. Every time Kaitlyn sees the cast she says "Daddy broken".

Monday is my one day of the week that Tyler doesn't go to school, so I usually save things that take a long time for Mondays. And this week, I found a friend to go to the zoo with us. I haven't taken Tyler since he was a year old (too young to enjoy it), and now they are both old enough to know the names of the animals and their sounds.

They loved it! They both got really into telling me what animal they were seeing. Hogle is a pretty good zoo, actually. And right now they even have a baby elephant.

Right next to the elephants, there was a rhino resting in his pen. Kaitlyn looked at him for a moment, and then said "dinosaur!". Not quite, honey. But close.

And then we came to this cougar. She wasn't sure exactly what to make of him either. Until he made a menacing growl at her. I guess it sounded enough like "meow" for her to make up her mind, because she said "cat?!" Yup. Really really big cat.

I don't know why, but giraffes are kinda my favorite. I love how much their body structure looks like horses, but . . . distorted into something even cooler. I guess my kids were more interested in their juice boxes at this point.

And of course, we have to get at least one picture of the family on a statue animal.

This was Tyler's favorite moment, when he found some meekrats that were just as excited about him as he was about them. Tyler would jump up and shriek with glee when one came over to him, and then the meekrat would jump around and run off. When it ran back to see him, Tyler would shriek and the meekrat would play with him and they both seemed to love it. You can see in this picture that there is a meekrat checking out each toddler.

They have a carousel at the zoo with zoo animals for you to ride on. Kaitlyn really wanted the giraffe, but she was just as happy with the elephant. So happy, in fact, that when I told her it was time to get off she clung tighter and shook her head frantically. I finally had to pry her off, sobbing. Poor thing.

We even rode the train at the end too.

It really was a great day at the zoo!