What do you do on a beautiful sunny Sunday, you take the kids to the Zoo of course! This afternoon the kids, my mom and I met up with a friend and her son at the Zoo. Her daughter was supposed to come too, but she had a play-date with another friend.
I love play-dates where we get to participate, and go do stuff. Lol I think that it’s so much better, instead of being stuck at someones house. Or worse them stuck at your house, I hate the small talk. I want my kids to have and play with their friends, but if I’m being honest I don’t always have stuff to say to their parents.
Typically the kids, and I have active Zoo memberships. All except Emilee that is, because the last time we renewed them she wasn’t old enough to need one. Except today once we got to the door, they told us our memberships had expired.
Oops, I suppose we haven’t been to the Zoo in quite some time. CLICK HERE to see our last time we were at the Zoo.
We renewed our memberships, and our friend was able to get Emilee in for free. With your membership you don’t have to pay for parking, however you need to register your license plate online to your account. I told my mom, that I would watch the kids while they set up the stuff online on her phone.
CLICK HERE if you want to learn more about what the Calgary Zoo, has to offer and get more information about the awesome animals.
Which lead me to have to watch four kids….alone at the Zoo. My kids aren’t angels, and they definitely don’t always listen. However I do have the advantage of deciding on discipline, since they are my kids. I always have a hard time trying to discipline other people’s kids, because of the obvious reason of them not being my kid(s.)
Especially when I know that, our parenting styles are different.
I managed to distract the kids, by taking them to see the Penguins first. I love the Penguins!! While we were there, one of the penguins was stealing pebbles from another penguins nest and bringing it to their nest LOL. It was hilarious to watch him waddle away, and of course I was lucky enough to capture one of the Penguins jumping in for a swim. 🙂
The kids and I watched the Penguins for about 10 minutes, then they got fed up and wanted to go look at the other animals.
Once you exit the Penguin area, you can continue to look at other animals. It brings you to the “Canadian Wilds” area, where you can see Canadian animals lol.
I’ve seen most of those animals, in the actual wild and I didn’t want us walking ahead too far without the others. So I was pleased to find an oversized red lawn chair, I managed to convince the kids to get a picture sitting on it. I told them, it would be cool to see the size difference…really it was just a stalling tactic.
Thankfully it worked, and my mom and our friend caught up.
Sadly I wasn’t able to get many pictures of animals, because my phone storage was full. Also keeping up with four kids, is hard work they all want to go do/see different things.
I got bummed out when I remembered that, the elephants are no longer at the Zoo. Elephants are my favourite animal, and knowing they aren’t supposed to be coming back is really disappointing.
As well as due to construction, they didn’t have the camels there or the Komodo dragons. However exciting news, May 2018 the Zoo will have Pandas! EEEK! Fluffy adorable Panda, will be here for us to admire.
The Butterfly conservatory was opened, and so I insisted we go see the butterflies. The moment you walk in, you’re hit with humid temperature. They’ve got butterfly cocoons behind glass, for the protection of the butterflies I’m sure. Then of course there are tons of beautiful butterflies flying around.
By some stroke of luck, we were all able to hold a butterfly. It was a first for all of us, the only one not willing to participate was Emilee. She wasn’t even willing to negotiate, there was no way she was going to let that butterfly land on her.
Typically it’s Zaden, that I have to convince to do this sort of thing. Not this time, this time the terrified child was Emilee. After some bribing convincing I managed to, at least have her near the butterfly while her Mémé held it. As you can plainly see, she wasn’t even going to give me the satisfaction of having a fake smile for the picture though.
Next stop was the little critters, the hippos, and the giraffes. The baby giraffe had just got into a little dispute, with the older giraffes so he was pouting away from them. ^_^ Giraffes are such beautiful creatures, they make my top list of favourite animals too.
Then there’s the hippos, they are so uhh what’s the word fat large. You can’t possibly say that you, don’t like hippopotamuses. Everyone must love them, even the name Hippopotamus is awesome.
Interesting fact: Hippos spray to mark their territory though. So don’t get too close!!
Have any of you seen that commercial, from a long time ago. About the “House Hippo”, (after googling) it came out in 1999. I remember being young and completely naive, and thinking that I wanted one so bad. Lol. Sadly no there is no such thing. If you haven’t seen the commercial, check it out on YouTube it’s really a cute clip.
Another interesting fact is Flamingos, don’t naturally have pink feathers. Their feathers turn, and stay pink because of their diets of shrimp and blue-green algae. Flamingos can often be found, standing using only one leg.
Did you know that North African Ostriches, are the fastest land bird. They can run up to 40 mph, which is pretty impressive!
What is it with kids and wanting to go to the park?
We could go to the park for free, on any given day. Yet as soon as they see a playground at the Zoo, they suddenly have to go play in the park areas.
We finished up at the playground, and went to see the gorillas, baboons, and monkeys. The baby gorilla we seen, has grown so much since we last came. 
I usually avoid these picture thingies, but we went down to the Dinosaur area (the boring part that I intentionally avoid) and the kids insisted.
We ended up spending the entire afternoon, at the Zoo. It wasn’t till shortly after 5pm, when they close that we made our way out. Despite spending the whole afternoon, at the Zoo. We still weren’t able to see all the animals. The upside, being we can always come back another day.
I’m also hoping all the fresh air, makes for an early bedtime for the kids.