First Trip to the Zoo

Being raised in Idaho there will never be a state that I will love more.  I miss Idaho terribly, but there are some amazing perks to being in Chicago.  One of these perks is the library system out here!  The libraries are HUGE and they have practically EVERYTHING.  Want to watch a new release?  Hit up the library, they get all the new movies, and renting them is free.  It is awesome.  Another awesome thing they do is every week they have two free zoo passes.  On Monday morning Erik called me and mentioned that I should go and try to get them since they go so fast, and luck would have it that I did get them!  We decided to take a little family outing, just Erik, Elijah, and me, and it was so fun!  We took over eighty pictures, but don't worry, I'm only going to post a few. :)

Our day started off at the camel exhibit!  The camels were one of the few animals Elijah actually watched.  (We went to the zoo for me, we knew that Elijah wouldn't really know any difference between the zoo and anywhere else. )

After the camels we hit up the Giraffes.  They were one of my favorites, I've never seen a giraffe in real life before, and they are pretty cool.

We meandered around looking at Rhinos and zebras, and all other sorts of fun things.  About half way through we passed a bathroom so I stopped in, giving Erik charge of the camera.  This is what happened while I was gone.

Erik Was so proud of his photo skills.

Although most of our pictures were taken of just animals, we did have one park attendant offer to take a family picture for us which was nice!

We kept wandering around and found the polar bear exhibit.  Just for the record, Polar Bears are HUGE!!!  Elijah also really liked being able to stand up by the glass and pound on it.  By far his favorite part of the zoo

We ended up going to the zoo on Thursday because it was the coolest day of the week, but the temperature was still in the upper 80's.  Elijah was getting restless in his stroller so he rode on our shoulders for a bit.  It's so nice that he is bigger now and we can do so much more with him!

Another one of my favorite exhibits was the penguins.  I've always loved penguins, and after watching them for a while Elijah started flapping his arms like they were.  Whether he meant to do it or not, who knows, but it sure was cute!

While walking between exhibits we passed a huge wall with face cutouts to take picture in.  Who can resist to stop when you have a little boy as cute as this!

After spending several hours walking around we were all getting pretty tired, so we stopped to see the monkeys on our way out.  They were pretty neat, and I think we would have enjoyed them even more if we hadn't been so tired.

We thought this gorilla looked like he had been sent to time out.  It made us laugh

After swinging by real quick to see the large cats we headed home.  It was a really fun trip and we all had a good time.  It was nice to get out just the three of us and spend some time together.  We are hoping to do more things like this in the future.

Lacey Miller