An Animal Kind of a Week

With the boy participating in Zookambi, a summer program at our zoo, we have spent many hours at the zoo checking out the animals. Monday, was his first true experience with mom dropping off somewhere to the complete care of strangers, with mom not needed on site. While I felt confident he would thrive and do fine, the girl and I stayed at the zoo for three hours on the first day. This gave me and DD some time there but also let me get a sense of the staffs competency and care.
While the boy was in class learning about camouflage and handling animals, we were exploring the zoo, spending long periods of time with certain animals watching them carefully, or simply staying out of the rain. We had a great discussion with a volunteer about the baby penguin, who by the way is very cute. During this discussion the lead zoo keeper came by and we made plans to watch him feed the penguins. When the time came he showed us some behind the scenes of penguin rock, we watched as they fed the baby and then the baby waddled over to me and stood on my foot. Very cute. Then we watched him feed the adult penguins by hand.
Yesterday after book discussion we went to the river to see if we could spot the peregrine falcon nesting on the board of water and light building. We knew three of babies had already fledged and the last we knew two were still in the nest preparing to fledge. We were not disappointed, we saw the three fledglings (flying and perched) and one baby falcon flapping it's wings gaining strength for its first flight. You can check out their web cam, here.
From there we went to the zoo and had a picnic and dropped off the boy to his class.
Then my daughter wanted to show her cousin Miley and show her around the Dairy Farm. We went to both the horse farm and the dairy farm. Farmer Bob greeted us kindly as he has every time since the births. Every time we talk I learn something else new about the dairy process or the cows. On average they birth a cow every other day. This past weekend they had a large amount of births so things will be slow for the next couple of weeks. They do birth year round but some months not as many as others.
Then we spent the last hour before picking up the boy walking through the zoo with my niece. We passed the boy at one point as he was checking out an animal exhibit with his class. He had just finished checking out the zoo kitchen were they prepare the food for the animals. Cool stuff.
So for this animal crazy family, it has been a perfect animal kind of a week.