A Looooong Day at the St. Louis Zoo

Joe is on vacation this week (although he would argue with that term since he will be working hard with home improvement projects all week) so we decided to take a trip to the St. Louis Zoo. We spent a full 6 hours there and the kids did great with that! We saw all of the "major" animals except for the rhino - he was either hiding or not on exhibit today. It was an absolutely gorgeous day, and I highly recommend a trip to the zoo at this time of year, preferably during the week. It seemed as if we had the entire zoo to ourselves! Plus, the animals were fairly active as it was not so hot outside.

Olivia with a cobra statue in the River's Edge exhibit. It took a little convincing for her to approach it as it did appear very life like.


This is actually the hippo exhibit but Ethan was more thrilled with the fish in their tank.

Posing with the Asian elephants. They cooperated nicely by eating their hay and then literally throwing the hay onto their backs. The kids found that hilarious.

The penguin house is my absolute favorite exhibit that they have (other than enduring the extreme cold temperature in the house!). Here are the kids outside of the exhibit house. This also appeared to be Ethan's favorite of the day since he could get so close to them.

Olivia posing with the penguin statue. We actually took this photo today since we have an almost identical picture of her when she was about 13 months old and barely taller than the statue!

Ethan watching the penguins. It is nearly impossible to take a good picture in this exhibit, so you can barely make out the 2 penguins swimming past him.

All of the animals were very interactive today so we were able to get so many good pictures. I am only posting a small number of what we took. Here is Ethan watching this chimpanzee eat his cabbage.

Olivia watching the 2 chimps eat cabbage and carrots.

Olivia, Ethan, and Joe waiting for the train to arrive. We used the train ride as a break from the walking. Poor Olivia really logged the miles today!

Ethan, Olivia, and I on the train.

No wonder it took us 6 hours to see all of the animals with Ethan in charge of the map!

Olivia and some Chinese bird. I knew that I would forget the name of it. She was fascinated by this bird because it made "clucking" noises yet it didn't really look like the typical chicken.

The reptile house was the kids' favorite part of the trip. I don't know why as they are not overly fascinated with them outside of the zoo - thank goodness. Here Olivia was really studying one of the snakes, who appeared to also be studying her!

As Joe pointed out, this is a picture of me feeding our son to the lizard. It was a good thing that he was extremely well behaved today or that may have been the case! ;)