15 Feb 2013 - Family outing to the Zoo

Today is my birthday and I decided to take annual leave to bring my whole family to the zoo.  Many colleagues and friends questioned me:"You are going to bring your family out on your birthday"?  I said yes....why not because to me as long as my family is happy, I will be happy as well.  I managed to ballot for a corporate friends of the zoo card from my company so we all got free entry into the zoo.  We reached the zoo at about 10am and to my surprise, it's pretty empty.

We managed to catch the Sea Lion show but Jerlene and Javier did not seem to enjoy it.  As such, we decided to skip the other shows.

Jerlene took over the map and found a picture of a water playground.  She kept asking me how to go there and from then on, that's the only thing on her mind.  Since she did not show much interest in viewing animals at that point, we decided to go straight to where she had wanted to go to.

We have prepared their swimming costumes for this trip as I knew that they will definitely enjoy the water playground the most.  True enough, they spent almost 2 hours simply running, sliding, splashing water in the playground.  We had a hard time asking them to leave the playground after that.

By the time they took a quick shower and got changed, it's almost 1pm.  So we decided to have our lunch at the KFC just next to the playground.  When we were about to finish lunch, Jerlene told me that she had a surprise for me and went away with her mommy.  I roughly knew what's going to happen.  They brought back a plate of ice cream waffle from Ben and Jerry's and started to sing birthday song for me.  However, my two angels were the ones who enjoyed the ice cream waffle the most.  As I've said earlier, as long as they are happy, I'll be happy.

After lunch, we continue to view the animals.  We came to an enclosure and Jerlene suddenly said:"Hey it's a Jaguar.  It can swim and jump up to a tree one......".  Both Tracy and I were quite surprised that she knew that's a jaguar.  We were even more surprised when we saw a board in the enclosure saying "Jaguar is a good swimmer and great climber".  Wow......how do she know that?  She then said:"Diego also have a jaguar, but a baby one.....".  So she had actually learned all this from Dora the Explorer video.  We went to the next enclosure and saw a cheetah.  Jerlene immediately said:"Cheetah can run very fast!"  I think it's worthwhile to invest in more educational videos.  :-)

We then went into an enclosed Aviary where small animals roam freely right in front of you.  There were animals such as reindeer, ducks, bats and ring-tail lemur, which was again pointed out by Jerlene.  There were some kids feeding the lemurs and both my angels quickly joined in.

It was a great family outing and we left the zoo at about 4:30pm.  We were very fortunate because throughout the trip, the sky was cloudy which led to a cool weather.  And minutes after we left, it started pouring........