Baby Giraffe at the Zoo!

We had a quick trip to the zoo today! I say quick because Dave had to get to work so we could only spend a little under 2 hours there. We wanted to go because one of the giraffes just had a baby!! As of today she is 12 days old and so cute!! We made sure to hit all the big animals but didn't visit any of the smaller ones this time. The kids didn't seem to mind and we all had a great time. Before we went to the zoo we went to IHOP for breakfast. I've been putting Ashlynn's hair in pigtails lately and I wanted to get a picture. She looks adorable! I love pigtails! ♥

 After breakfast we headed to the zoo! Our first stop was to see the elephants. I'm pretty sure mama elephant was taking a little nap while baby played around in the dirt. Ashlynn can say "elephant" and "giraffe" now so she was showing a lot of excitement when she saw the animals that she recognized.

After that we headed over to Rocky Shores to see the otters, seals, polar bear, and bears! On the way we stopped so the kids could play in this log. They thought it was cool!

The kids got to get up close to the seals and polar bear again! The seals are always pretty active and the kids love watching them swim around. The polar bear has been really active twice now that we have gone. It's fun to watch her play in the water! Here's a picture of her saying hi to Ashlynn.

After I took this picture a huge crowd of kids had gathered around to watch the polar bear and would scream every time she came up close. This scared Ashlynn. :( You'll see it in the video. She liked it when the polar bear was up close (at least she did the first time when I took this picture) so the screams are probably what scared her.


The kids were starting to push a lot so we decided to get out of there. Next up were the giraffes! I love this picture, it's so sweet!

And a close up of the new baby girl. She's 12 days old today.

We went to visit the tigers, who were sleeping as usual. They are still one of my favorites, even though they don't do much. Then we went to see the gorillas. There is this one gorilla, I need to learn her name, I've posted a picture of her before from one of our previous trips, I always get the feeling that she is so sad every time we see her. :( It makes me sad. Today when we went to see her she was sitting really close to the glass and there were a bunch of people looking at her. All of a sudden she jumped up and started pounding on the glass and then went and sat down again. Because there was such a big crowd there already our kids didn't see it and I'm glad they didn't because it probably would have scared the crap out of them! They did end up getting a close look at her, though.

I think the gorilla was frustrated with everybody looking at her. She grabbed a bunch of hay, walked into the other room, and climbed up high where she was far away from everyone. Dawson thought it was super cool to watch her climb. He was so excited and said it was "AWE-SOME!!!"

After that we went to take a "growth check" picture that we've decided to take on each trip but they have a lot of construction going on right now (building an African Savanna!) and the place that we normally take the pictures at was blocked off! Bummer! We found a similar place to take pics, though, so this is where we'll be taking them from now on.

Before we left Dawson wanted to get his picture taken with the gorilla statue. We've asked him a few times on previous visits if he wanted to but he was always too scared before. We didn't even ask him this time, he asked me to take his picture there. Ashlynn wasn't scared so she joined him.