It's Ella's Golden Birthday!!

Yesterday, Ella was 5 on August 5th and celebrated her golden birthday!! Technically, she thought she already had her birthday because we had her party on Saturday. But we made it a special day anyway and she, Lily and I met our friends Arie and Jody at the MN Zoo. We proceeded to spend FIVE HOURS there! We saw everything there was to see and I was exhausted by the end of the afternoon. But the kids all did great and no one got crabby or complained the entire time we were there (other than the typical "I'm hot." and "I'm hungry."). They have some new animal exhibits since the last time we were there, which was back in February I think. Ella has been asking me for weeks now to go to the zoo so I thought it would be a fun birthday thing to do. The new Grizzly Bear exhibit was really cool and they had a kid's area with a giant mammoth fossil replica. Sand surrounded it and the kids could pretend to excavate the bones. Ella thought this was pretty cool. Especially because we were at the Science Museum recently (that's another post coming) and they have big dinosaur skeletons there and dioramas of archaeological digs. Ella was asking me all about this when we were there. So it was cool to remind her of that conversation and for her to see what I was actually talking about.

Here are some pictures from our trip to the zoo:




Jody brought us all frosted sugar cookies and juice boxes in honor of Ella's birthday and gave her a card. We thought it was so nice of her to do that!


Since the MN Zoo is indeed a Midwestern zoo, it would not be complete without a farm section. You get to ride on a wagon from the depot area to the little farm and can pet all kinds of farm animals: goats, pigs, cows, and chickens. (Don't worry they have sinks everywhere to wash your hands thoroughly!) ;-) Lily is nowhere to be found in the pictures except at the chicken coop because she was thoroughly scared of the animals the entire time and clung to me.



We even got to see the kid goats playing with each other. It looks like they are fighting and ramming each other, but really they are just playing.



Whereas Lily was scared of more than half the animals, Ella has no fear. We came upon a zoo guy holding this giant snake and she wanted to touch it. I had my camera out (actually my dad's camera that we borrowed) and he said, "Hold on and then we can have a picture". I was like, oh-kay. I thought he didn't want the snake to freak out from the flash or something. Then, all of sudden he let Ella go under the rope partition and told her to stand to his right and help hold the snake! And she did without even questioning it!

Can you believe that?! I wouldn't be caught dead going near that thing!



In the summer months, the zoo has a butterfly garden with many different varieties flying around and beautiful flowers. It was so fun to go through and see all of them. We finally found something Lily wasn't afraid of! ;-) And one landed on Arie's back which was very cool! I wonder if it was her peach colored shirt it was attracted to. She was the only one of us that had a more typical "flower" colored shirt on.


That concludes our marathon trip to the zoo! And Ella's fifth birthday. I think it was a great one for her and will be hard to live up to next year!