Mini Fall Break

Our school district set up a mini fall break this last weekend. Friday was parent/teacher conferences and the boys got Monday off. The school makes it sound like they are so generous. Uh, don't they just tack the day on somewhere else? And wouldn't a short respite for the teachers and students be better than a one day longer summer vacation? Anyway, we used the time to work on Alex's space derby rocket. With the paints, I went ahead and had the other kids paint too.

Macey enjoyed painting. Hm, if I let my little girl paint everyday for the next 2.5 years until Kindergarten, what sort of artist would I have? It is something I am considering. She loves to color, draw and paint. It would be a great opportunity for her, if she enjoys it.

Moving on to our Monday. We went to the Dallas/Ft Worth zoo. And it was awesome! There were hardly any other guests. We mostly had it all to ourselves. It started out foggy and brisk, but ended up being a perfectly warm fall day. We started by taking the train up to the 'Texas Wild' section.

Here they had the 5 different terrains of Texas separated so you could study the animals, plants and industry of each section. The kids are in the hayloft.

The swamp section had this fabulous alligator.

The woodlands had this beautiful eagle.

As we journeyed through the rest of the zoo we found this parakeet palace. For $1 you could feed the birds. Here Alex has a clutch of cockatiels.

Ryan went to the farthest reaches of the place to find a hoard of parakeets.

Of course Ryan would find a way to get a bird to climb on him.

And then there was this white Bengal tiger which we will all be hearing about for the rest of our lives whenever a zoo is mentioned. He was up to the glass peering at the kids. He would put his large paws on the glass and scratch at it. Macey thought he was playing patty cake with her! He really liked Ryan's stripes and sat nice and close to him.

He, however, did not like Alex's blue shirt coming straight at him. He gave a nice roar right as Alex approached him. This frightened Alex a good deal. I don't know if he'll become more interested in tigers or just afraid of them.

By 1:30 everyone was tired, but we still had so much more to see! But we finished off our adventure and headed home.

Our last stop was to the gift shop where we came home with a penguin, a tiger, and a football (for sister).