Thomas helping Kei in the yard and making the most of the good weather before I turns bad later today. My plans for the remainder if the day? Many loads of laundry, cooking dinner and some dedicated downtime. In fact I just finished watching Enchanted. I expected it to be better than it was and was actuall grateful that Kei chose not to watch it with me. I don’t think I could have handled the snide comments I was sure to get from him during the movie.

Thomas is enjoying selected scenes now – the ones with lots of animals and singing and dancing. He just woke up from a three and a half hour nap. I think he was making up for yesterday when he chose not to take one at all. Nice break though.

Kei had a training course all day today so THomas and I went to the zoo – along with the rest of Oregon. Apparently Elephant’s 47th birthday plus first sunny weekend day in months equals thousands of people wanting to visit the zoo. We had to park in the overflow parking lot and catch a shuttle the rest of the way. And when I say shuttle, I mean converted school bus that is not really designed to carry whole families AND their wagons full of zoo visit crap.

Thomas enjoyed the bus ride though and the beauty of having a zoo membership means we can go for just a couple of hours and not feel like we are watsing our money. On Thomas’ wish list for the day – the elephants, the giraffes and the tigers. Done! We can also add the hippos who were actually visible this time (hence the photo) and the zebras who showed more than their backsides for once. I don’t know what it is about te zebras – they always seem to want to face AWAY from the crowd. I probably would too if I had people staring at me all day.

The long walk home. I think I may have mentioned before that there is a park on Thomas’ walk home from daycare and that sometimes he can become a little distracted and that short 3 block walk can become an hour long adventure. Such was the case on Friday when I picked Thomas up from daycare. It was a beautiful warm afternoon and we made the most of it by hanging out by the fountain and checking out some baseball practice. Thomas wanted to go down the slide as well but I wasn’t able to follow him so he did it on his own for the ver first time. But just one time and then we HAD to leave.

By the time we got home we had worked the VERY long way and I was exhausted. A 15 minute walk had turned into an hour. I just don’t have the stamina I used to have.

I love the ideas that go through my mind when I see other people’s photos. The bright colours, the toddlers frolicking outside with multi coloured umbrellas that are just so much fun.

Instead the Ishida’s have a black umbrella and this totally unstaged moment is my reminder to buy something that is more camera-friendly. But I guess black is how we roll.

This IS one of those times when photos could speak though (yes, I know about video). Thomas was singing “I’m singing in the rain” while I took this photo. 🙂