Z-O-O

Lately, upon being asked what she has been doing, Natalie has been responding by telling people, "just hanging around doing nothing." Nothing? That's when I direct her back to the blog and remind her of all of the "nothing" we've been doing all summer. But in a way, I can see her point. Most summers we've had passes to go to Sea World and have spent lots of time in the waterpark or we've gotten tickets to Fiesta Texas or passes to the zoo. Ever since I read the warning label on her medicine that states: "prolonged or excessive exposure to direct and or artificial sunlight SHOULD BE AVOIDED (on the bottle it's underlined too) whike taking this medication" I've been leery about taking her outside to do too much. I asked the pharmacist to define prolonged and excessive and she said about 30 minutes in the sun maximum! The Gastro doctor said she's okay out in the sun as long as she has sunblock on her and reapply often. If she's out too long she may break out in a rash, and believe me we're always on the lookout for it!

She's been doing well on her medicine this summer and has been fine with sunblock applied every hour, so we discussed getting zoo passes. Of course she was in the room when we were talking about it, so I spelled the word zoo so she wouldn't know what we were saying. She immediately said, "I want to go to the zoo!" So, now that she can spell I guess Mark is going to have to learn Spanish!

A couple of summers ago we had passes to the zoo and used to take her often, however, she has no memory of ever having been there. So, when we took her today it was like she was going for the first time. She loved looking at all of the animals. Her favorites seemed to be the elephant and the gibbons. The gibbons swung all over their cage and one of them had a little baby gibbon hanging onto its mom while it was swinging and climbing. They really made her laugh. I sprayed her down with sunblock every hour, and we made sure to go early enough in the morning so we could leave by lunchtime when it was really getting hot.

Natalie and Mark


We fed nectar to the few lorikeets that were hungry. These guys must be fed all day long because they didn't seem to have much of an appetite.


A girl's gotta have her essentials along! I didn't notice she had "packed" a lipgloss until she climbed up to see the Nile Crocodile!


Excited to be at the z-o-o.


The elephants were one of Natalie's favorite zoo animals.