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Thursday, March 25, 2010

First Trip of the Year to the National Zoo

Even though the excitement of Johnny's birthday is over, we still have Daddy home on his convalescent leave for another week! So we thought we would take advantage of the beautiful weather and take Johnny to see the animals at the National Zoo!

We loaded our wagon with a picnic lunch and headed to the metro station.

Once we walked up hill from the metro station to the Zoo we got right into seeing the animals and Johnny was very excited! If you look close you can see the cheetah walking away.

Here the emu was trying to escape and stood this close to us sticking his head through the fence over and over again.

It was still early in the season so there was a lot of construction going on and some of the exhibits where not open, like the elephant house, but the elephants where outside and Johnny LOVED it...I don't think he knew how big they really where.

He quickly learned the point of being at the zoo and started to run from exhibit it exhibit, find the animal and point it out to us.

Here in the small mammal house we tried to tell Johnny this is an armadillo, but he was convinced it was a rock and kept telling us..."no rock, rock" So why would he stick around to look at a rock where there are monkeys to be seen.

see...monkey!
A lot of the animals must have been excited to have people around because they where free and about, like this Prairie Dog. Of course Johnny started saying the animals where "stuck" I can't deiced if that was because some of them wouldn't move or because there where behind glass.

More monkeys!
Loven the really close meercats.

And then on to the big monkeys, he picked up quickly on the fact that there where Gorillas and knew the difference!

And then our picnic lunch...yum! But Johnny was very excited and wanted to get up and get on the move.

Monkey Daddy and Monkey Johnny on the big gorilla.

Headed into the reptile house, at first he was stuck on "dinosaur" as we told him what everything was he learned it very quickly.

I am not sure what lizard this is, but I love this picture of Johnny up sitting just like it and looking so carefully.

There where a lot of alligators and crocodiles, and at first Johnny wanted to see them all as close as possible, but when they started to open their mouths and swim toward him he started to back away. He didn't scream or yell, but my big boy was smart enough to know to be a little afraid and I am so proud that he figured that out, basically all by himself.

Big turtles where kind of interesting, but they moved so slowly that he lost interest quickly.

and look "INOSAUR!" This bronze skull was part of an big cat exhibit (even though the lions where off exhibit) as the biggest meat eater ever...it was very exciting.

This entire day was for Johnny and he loved the attention and the new animals and Mommy and Daddy loved seeing him so happy and learning. And yes that is my two year in a full 4T outfit!!

In the morning when we told Johnny where headed to see animals, we named off animals and Johnny asked "cow?" we said yes...and that was what he was excited about saying "moo moo."

Johnny taking his turn pulling the wagon.

But about 4 pm, after having been at the zoo for 5 hours we where all pretty tired, finishing up in the bird house which wasn't as exciting for Johnny as we thought it would be. On our way out we wanted to walk down the "Asia path" and see the pandas and giraffes and such, but still being chilly and not fully in season we saw nothing down that path. We where a little disappointed with how much of the zoo was still closed, but we had a blast and Johnny loved it too! I am so proud at how much of a little sponge he is! He wants to know everything. I have a million pictures from zoo, this is just some of them!

Walking back to the metro we saw many Cherry Blossom trees preparing to bloom and this one tree right out side of the zoo that was already in full bloom. Next week during the Cherry Blossom festival Grams, Pops and Uncle Tommy are taking Johnny and Ella to the museums and too see the full trees in bloom!

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