Playing Hooky

So I woke up on Friday for my early morning walk and was so happy to get my body moving and my day started.  Then for some reason between that walk and getting the kids up for school I thought "I want a random day of fun with my kids".  It was so pretty out and I thought they would enjoy taking daddy some lunch and then going to the zoo.  We have a membership there and we NEVER use it, so I thought why not.  I got them up at basically the same time and made a deal with them, if they cleaned the upstairs, which was in desperate need, then we could have this really fun day together.  Well they took the bait, worked really hard and at 10:45 we were off on our adventure.  It was such a great day.  Kyle recently had a brand new room built at school so we had fun checking that out.  Then lunch at Taco Bell and this really nice lady that came up to us there and told us we had a beautiful family.  So sweet, the kids were actually being really good and funny so I'm sure that didn't hurt our beautiful standings.  Then off to the zoo we went.  Kyle had to go back to work so I was on my own, but it went GREAT!  We were laid back and just went to see the animals we felt like seeing.  I had luckily packed a ton of snacks, the kids eat non stop these days.  They cleaned me out and wanted more.  We even rode the train, which used to be a longer ride but was still a blast to them.  The baby elephant was super cute and I really enjoyed watching them just have a fun day with me.  The worst part was of course the walk to the car.  It's all up hill out of that Zoo to get back to the car so I had to carry, in shifts, the two younger ones.  Alex begged me but he was where I drew the line, I wanted to live to see another day after all.

Now here are way to many pictures, as usual, for you to enjoy :)

Sarah took her video camera that she got for her birthday and shot a few of the fun moments.
They all loved finding where we were on the maps.  So cute.
Trying to take a  self portrait.  Hard with this many people.
On the train.  They thought it was great, but really not what it used to be.
A nice person took our picture, good thing because we were having no luck the other way.  We tried several times.
Elephant booty, see the cute baby.
The elephant museum was actually really cool.  We stepped in to address a serious boo-boo that Adam had gotten and ended up enjoying strolling through there and looking at all the cool stuff.  Especially this mastodon. (sp?) 
Alex LOVES bats.  Although he made a funny observation that they look just like our dog Padme'.  Scary.
We were all a little concerned about the Naked Mole Rats.  
Here is my little sweetie in the cutest mask.  These were actually pretty reasonably priced compared to most of the things there, but I could not convince anyone to buy one.  I thought it was cute and they had about 15 different animals to choose from.

A super fun day!