Kindergarten Field Trip

Luke's kindergarten class went on a field trip to the zoo this morning. It was pretty crazy because it was the morning & afternoon classes that his teacher teaches, plus one other kindergarten class from the school. I drove and met the school bus at the zoo so I could take Blondie & Kitty with me. We had a girl from Luke's class, Cortni, that was assigned to me to chaperone so it wasn't too bad. (The worst part of the trip was that every time I stopped the stroller for 2 seconds, Kitty would climb out and want to walk around. She kept trying to wander off and do her own thing. Maybe next time I'll take the child wrist strap with me...)
It was a VERY nice day, close to 70 degrees. The animals were more active than I have seen a lot of them. When we first got to the zoo, a tiger and a wolf were both walking pretty quickly around their enclosures and coming up to the fence. When we got down to the other side of the tiger enclosure some of the zoo staff were doing a demonstration with the tiger on how they train him and reward him (with food) when he follows their commands. At one point he stood up on his hind legs and put his front paws on the fence in front of him. I couldn't believe how BIG he was. (Unfortunately I didn't get a picture of it because I was trying to keep the kids together.) Right next to the tiger demonstration there was a leopard that was pacing back and forth right in front of the viewing windows, just staring at the people looking at him.

A lot of the animals were eating: the giraffes, bears, rhinos, elephants and some of the monkeys. There is a baby orangutan at the zoo that was having all sorts of fun in his enclosure - climbing things and swinging around. Kitty liked it when he lost his grip and fell a short distance to the ground. She kept saying, "Uh-oh, he fall down." Right after the orangutans there was a large gorilla who was walking back and forth in his cage. Kitty thought that he was pretty scary looking and wanted me to hold her.

We also saw a peacock showing off his tail. It was beautiful - almost fake looking! When we got close to him we noticed that he was actually shaking his tail back and forth slightly and it was making a rattling sound almost like the sound a rattlesnake makes with it's tail. We think he may have been trying to scare off some turkeys that were near him.

All in all the trip was nice but seemed pretty short. The buses ended up leaving the school a little later than they wanted to so we didn't get to the zoo as early as we would have liked. By the time we walked around a little and then ate lunch it was just about time to go. Since I was going to take Luke home with me we dropped Cortni off with the bus group and then the kids wanted to go play at the playground for a few minutes. So we walked over to the playground and played for a few minutes but I think the kids were getting a little hot and tired (and the playground was pretty crowded with bigger kids) so there were no complaints when I said it was time to go home.