Riverbanks Zoo

At the rate I'm posting lately - I'm going to be posting about Thanksgiving during Christmas and Christmas during Valentine's Day and so on and so forth. Such is my life right now - crazy days with three kiddos. Although I like to blog and document our lives for not only myself, but friends and family that aren't near, I'm happy that being outside or in the floor with my wee ones is taking center stage.

A few weeks ago I met two of my high school girl friends in Columbia at the zoo. I'm so thankful that Casey, Jennifer, and I have maintained our friendships because I treasure them so very much. We made plans to meet earlier in the summer but it didn't work out and then we were planning on early fall and again it didn't work out, so we finally picked a date and although the forecast wasn't looking great we kept our plan anyways and I'm so glad we did. The kids had so much fun!

~Kennedy, Addie, Luke, Jake, and Avery~

One of our first stops: the lions!

Practicing their cow-milking skills. You know...in case they ever need to know how. ha!

Addie (having big sister experience with Luke) was so sweet to Avery.

Jake and Addie see each other often and are best buds, but they took Kennedy right in obviously:

One of my favorite parts of the entire day was the giraffe feeding station. We didn't buy giraffe food (aka - lettuce), but the kids quickly realized they could pick up the lettuce that others had dropped and the giraffes would come to them too. It was really neat to be that close to them and to see the kids excitement over being so close to them too.

Here's my brave Avery:

Seriously!?!? How cool is that:

I love giraffe eyes - they are so dark and dramatic.

I don't think I realized until this little adventure how long their tongues are....they are crazy long!

The zoo is pretty small but I found the giraffe activity to be super awesome as well as the kangaroo walkabout. There is a gated area where you can walk through and be amongst the kangaroos. The kangaroos were kind of like "whatever - we see you people all the time" but it was still cool.

We ended our fun zoo day with a picnic and play time in the park area. It was so good to visit and let our kiddos play with each other for part of the day. I'm bummed that we failed to get a big group picture! I wish we were closer so we could make getting together a regular occurrence, but I'm so very thankful I'm close enough now to even have the opportunity to do stuff like this with them. I'm really hoping to make a trip to Charleston soon and we'll for sure get together again.