Day 4 with Dylan

After a good night sleep, Dylan decide he wanted to go back to the zoo and see all his favorite animals.  We played at home for awhile before the zoo opened.  We played with trucks, we played in the tent so we didn't get rained on, and we introduced Dylan to a new play set, a canal and truck set.  The set has places to put both water and sand, though we had neither as we were playing in the playroom and not outside.  The set has gates to lift and a crane to load up the barges with.  It also has trucks that can dump the cargo and speed boats to zoom in the canal.

We started with the Lions, the 2 males lying on top of the big rock watching over the kingdom.  Dylan loves to see them.  Next we went to watch the orangutans, who were locked in a wrestling match.  They showed varsity level skills and entertained us for at least 10 minutes.  The chimpanzees were outside and were mostly hiding away from the people.

We stopped by to say hi to the lion again on the way over to see Sammy and Sally seal, to our delight we saw the baby seal playing in the water.  Nearby we could see crowds of kids, all in Packers' gear and yes for the 2nd year in a row we stumbled on Donald Driver's annual GO! Green and Gold Training Camp for kids.  Of course Grandpa, being unaware of the zoo event was dressed in his Brewer gear, not his Packer gear!  We watch for a little while before going to see the Bison.  On the way over we saw Henry the friendly lion, and checked out the giraffes.  Dylan is fascinated with the big animals and really likes the Bison, he loves their hairy heads.  We go right by some cute prairie dogs that draws large crowds, but Dylan had no interest in them, he only wanted to get closer to the big Bison.

We headed for the Children's Zoo area, and to our pleasant surprise there was no line at the train ride, obviously the Donald Driver event had kids occupied elsewhere.  Grandpa got to ride in the Blue train car with Dylan, quite cozy.  Grandma and Dylan rode the carousel, and Dylan chose the elephant again.  We played in the tree of life play area, going up to the bridge, going down the little slide, and hiding in the tubes.  The surface is perfect for kids to play on.

No zoo trip would be complete without spending time playing on the red tractor.  Dylan is now an expert tractor driver and can climb and crawl all over the tractor with ease.  He is courteous to other kids who want to play on it.  They only last a minute or so and then he is back on his favorite red tractor cruising across imaginary fields and climbing into the engine to fix it.

We stopped in the store to find a souvenir of our 2 trips to the zoo.  Grandma and Grandpa saw a Bison and thought that would be the one, but after checking out 4 of Dylan's "favorite" animals and "favorite" cars, he picked a fierce Lion named Henry and a zoo truck that carried an elephant and tiger.

We stopped at Qudoba on the way home for  a burrito bowl for Dylan.  He took a long nap, giving grandpa time to fill up 35 water balloons!   We thought we would try a similar approach and fill up the Pirate water table in a shady spot.  The water balloons throwing was quite fun, mostly because Grandma was much more of the target than grandpa :-)  When the 35 water balloons were all gone we sprinted over to the Pirate water table.  We really got into the water table this time around and towards the end, the water table playing escalated into much more splashing, and then throwing of water with the scoops and little buckets!  The water table emptied and we needed more water to continue the fun.

Once inside we began to wind down with a good bath.  We continued the bedtime wind down by watching the Cars DVD versus using the iPad to get to a nice bedtime calm.  We may have found something, gone was the frenzy of finding videos, rejecting videos and finding new videos.