let's go to the zoo...

We took Mason to the zoo for the first time this week and he loved it! We started the day off with his 4 month pictures (more on that soon!) and then headed down to Indy for a perfect day at the zoo. We had to rent one of the zoo's strollers because this mommy right here forgot ours AND our front/back baby carrier... and didn't realize it until right as we pulled into the zoo parking lot... DOH!

We started out in the forests and saw some cute little red pandas & Reeves' muntjacs, white-handed gibbons, Asian small-clawed otters, Amur tigers, Island Flying Fox bats & Straw Colored Fruit bats, and Alaskan brown bears; the bald eagles are in the forests too, but due to some critters chewing holes in the netting, the eagles were relocated elsewhere.

As soon as we wound through the forests, we made our way to the plains, after passing some ring-tailed & crowned lemurs, flamingos, and some random ducks. We saw some wildebeests, ostriches, giraffes, white rhinos, African lions, cheetahs, African elephants, baboons, a crowned crane, a marabou stork, and Guinea fowl!

It took us about an hour to get through the plains, so we stopped to get an ice-cold lemonade and took a short break. Mason was just enjoying the ride in the stroller and didn't even want to eat yet, so we kept on truckin' to the deserts. Here we saw lots of different lizards, iguanas, dragons, and tortoises, some zebra finch, slender-tailed meerkats, several different kinds of cacti, and then we saw all the snakes!

After spending so much time in the 80* deserts biome, we were more than ready to get back outside to that beautiful weather! Last stop was the oceans where we saw the Atlantic bottlenose dolphins, a Pacific walrus, California sea lions, harbor & gray seals, aquariums full of cow-nosed rays, reef fish, & moon jellies, long snout, potbellied & lined seahorses, King penguins, gentoo penguins & rockhopper penguins, the polar bear, and dog sharks that you can pet! Mason fell asleep after the dolphins, but mommy and daddy enjoyed the rest of the ocean biome!

Mason woke up right after we left the oceans, just in time to return our rented stroller and head home. Mason's favorite part of the day was the dolphins; and mommy's favorite part of the day was watching him follow the dolphins as they swam around us. He was so intrigued by them! All in all, it was a great day!