Zoology

I never do this, I promise! But today I spent the entire day in my PJ's. Not until after dinner did I bother to dress and that was only because we had plans with friends. It was so nice. Hope and I are still trying to recover from our whirl-wind weekend last weekend. It was so fun, though. However, I do praise God for the rain today that beckoned us to stay in and stay in our jammies. Woody didn't get to recover he had to go to work despite the rain, poor guy.
Here are the last of our photos from our itsy bitsy taste of spring weekend we enjoyed. Sunday's outing was the zoo. See Hop-Hop in Hope's hand? Hop came with us to literally every exhibit. We were quite impressed with Evansville's little zoo. It was my first trip, but from what I've heard, they've made a lot of improvements from just a few years ago.

Hope makes a good little tourist. I expected bouncing from one exhibit to the next without really looking at any of them. Not at all! Hope lingered at each one as if it were the only one we'd come to see. Here we're on the path leading to...well I forget where but that's not important. See here she's so confident and proud to be walking instead of riding in her stroller. What she didn't know was that we were about to come upon....

this: right there in the path. He was strutting his stuff as only peacocks can do. I thought she'd chase it or laugh. She was terrified and wouldn't go past it.

Here she is keeping an eye on it. What a picture can't capture is how hard she's pressing against Woody's leg. We had to carry her past it. The lion, the hippos, a large snake, being literally right next to a donkey when it did it's amazingly loud "hee-haw" were all no problem for her. But this peacock was very scary.

Here was one of Hope's favorite exhibits. I'm sure she thought she was right there at the lion's cage. This was before we'd gotten to see the real lions.

Just a quick picture of me with Hope by the ducks. We could have stayed here forever! She really liked watching them.

And of course there was a children's petting section where you could pet goats. Look at their crazy pupils. Personally, I was most afraid of them. Who ever heard of rectangle pupils?! Creepy.

Typical parents of toddlers would have stopped at the zoo and said, "whew! what a good day!" Not us. We push Hope to her limits. When we were done at the zoo, we headed toward the mall. There we rode a carousel. (Hope's first ride of any type that I can remember) She loved it. I told her we were the princesses riding our horses. She just wanted to know where Pappy was 'cause where there's horses, there should be Pappys. She also was so extra proud of the stamp they gave her at the end: it was of a horse. (sorry for the picture quality: we left the camera in the car and had to use our camera phone)

Then we did some shopping. Here we are at Old Navy. Keeping in the animal theme of the day, Hope is visiting with this dog. In between the last picture and this, we enjoyed smoothies and pretzels. See the smile on that face? This is after such a long day that began with getting her up early for the 8:30 service at church, watching some UK basketball while we ate lunch, visiting a zoo and being drug all over a mall. All this with her only nap being in the car during our drive to Evansville. She was smiling like this all day. No fussing at all. Tell me how I got so lucky?! After this, we took her to Olive Garden with us where she was also a jewel. I know there's a lot more life to live for this little girl and who knows what lurks around the bend of the "terrible 2's" but we feel pretty blessed.

***note to all mothers of toddlers who may be hating me right now: I did pay for it on Monday morning with a little cranky pants who was just worn out!