Kamryn's First Visit to the Zoo

I know, it is pretty sad my daughter is 2 and a half and she hasn't been to the zoo yet. I really wanted to wait until she could really enjoy the whole experience. So last week my mom and I took a day off work and spent the day at the zoo. Kamryn really loved it, she had a few meltdowns (expected with no nap) but was great overall. The first exhibit we went to was the rain forest and there was this section with a squirrel. This squirrel was running around and trying to dig in the sand for food. Kamryn was apparently yelling at the squirrel to eat its food. We were there for about 10 minutes watching this--I thought to myself at this rate it will take us three days to get through the zoo. We finally made it through there and off to some more. She was not sure about the monkeys though. She loves monkeys, she has a Curious George monkey and she absolutely loves him. She loved this stuffed animal to the point that we have monkey jewelry and several monkey pajamas. However, when you go to the zoo the monkeys don't look like her monkey at home so she thought we were crazy. Below are some pictures and I will add more with them.

In the rain forest building, there was this tube you could crawl through and be surrounded by the fish--Kamryn thought it would be cute to smoosh her face on the glass.

She really loved watching the "pretty fish" swimming around too. That is my girl--I could sit there for hours watching the fish.

Another animal she really likes are "baby elephants" (I believe this is my grandmother watching over her). I don't think she anticipated the elephants being so large.

At the children's zoo section there is a carousel, unlike her mother, Kamryn did not enjoy sitting on an animal and going around in circles. She prefers to just sit on the bench. She really loved the playground though, she would slide down and then run around for another turn--she could have stayed here all day. Except, a little girl took too long and it was the beginning of one of the meltdowns. There was also a petting zoo. This was right after the playground meltdown so at first she wanted nothing to with touching or brushing the animals. We finally got over the meltdown and then we had to brush every animal there.

They had this pretty cool exhibit where she could stand up in these domes like she was a gopher. It took awhile for us to be able to see her--she is on her tippie toes. You can't tell in the picture, but there are gophers around the domes.

Random statue there that Kamryn wanted to sit on. I believe it was a buffalo.

Then of course you can't leave the zoo without riding the train. However, next time we may do it first before she gets tired--I think she would enjoy it better. She was on her last stretch at this point--she fell asleep before we got on the freeway to come home.