Rainboots in July: Zoo-riffic

It's the latest craze in our household to celebrate birthdays late. Extremely late. Everly's takes the cake (ha!) cashing in almost two months past the big day. She wanted to go to the zoo for her party and during spring break her cousins were sick, then we got rained out on our first attempt and this final day was worth the wait. A gorgeous sunny day, her cousins got to skip school, and we saw every.animal.there. We left as soon as Jeremy got home from work in the morning and then we shut that place down. A good, beautiful, fun, exhausting day. And I also think that I should have a disclaimer here that I've been taking all of my photos on the manual setting for a year now which should mean that I know what I'm doing, but it actually means that I'm getting the guess and check setting stage. That said, I took 674 photos today. And being the sentimental gal that I am, I will not delete any. So the 33 that actually made it to the blog is pretty uh-mazing that I was able to narrow it down. There may be a support group out there for people like me.

Ev wore an owl mask in order to fit in with the animals.

She also thought she should show the real leopard her baby leopard. He was clearly impressed.

And on this special occasion we got to feed the giraffes. We looooove feeding giraffes.

Parks fed a giraffe when he was two. He's still talking about it. A lot.

Carousel break. We did it all today.

We could all probably stay at the penguin exhibit all day in one of these bubbles.

Parks was starting to break down here. Still (semi)tried to be a (semi)good sport. We took his temp when we got home and it was 103, so I tried to quickly forgive him for his ongoing breakdowns over the last few hours. Woops!

We went to every exhibit and I don't think we missed a single animal. It was quite an amazing day!

Feeding the birds. I absolutely love these birds.

I think my kids scrounged up a lot of dollars because they seemed to always have a stick to feed the birds.

This gorilla was very impressed with my monkeys.

An attentive auntie.

Oh, and we fed the elephants too! Everly was pretty sure we could feed every animal. She walked around with grass she kept picking all day "for the tigers".