A week among the animals

This past week was Liza's spring break from preschool, a time when all of her playmates were out of town and all of the play areas and museums are totally swamped with families desperate for entertainment. Jason had to go to Germany on business for the whole week (poor guy), which left me faced with seven straight days of no school, no playdates, and no escape.

So we drove to Kentucky.

Yeah, I know, but it makes about as much sense as anywhere else you can drive on one tank of gas, plus we have friends down there who were desperately in need of swaddling blankets and crocheted stroller blankets. Right?

On the way down we stopped in Columbus to visit the zoo there with some friends. It was alternately pleasantly chilly and viciously cold and rainy, and we weren't really dressed to stand it for long, but Liza and Joy had fun chasing each other around the inside exhibits.

The zoo has a brand new baby elephant - as in, "born two days before we got there" new - which wasn't out where you could see it, but they had shuffled the pens around and the male elephant happened to be in the area closest to the observation area in the elephant house (where Liza and Joy were running endless laps around an interior wall). Let's just say that he had some impressive junk, especially when he decided to pee the entire contents of a wading pool all over the floor. For five minutes straight.

As soon as we left the zoo the weather cleared up, and Liza enjoyed the sunshine as she spent the next four hours "reading" her new fairy tale books and listening to The Princess and the Pea audiobook over and over and over again.

Our first morning in Richmond was a bit chilly (we had to scrape the ice puddles off the bottoms of the slides), but that didn't keep us from enjoying one of the 5,086 parks in town. We proved that she's now fully capable of conquering every slide that previously caused her to quake in terror.


We enjoyed the spring flowers, which are several weeks farther along than the flowers in Cleveland.


One of my main reasons for visiting Richmond was to eat at some of the restaurants we have missed since we moved. The Thai place was still there, and Sonny's, and Madison Garden, and Giovanni's, and Sonic. Yeah, should have brought more elastic-waist pants on this trip.

We had gotten the basic "Hooked on Math" for Liza before we left Cleveland, and I accidentally left the first set of flash cards in my purse when we left for Kentucky. Liza was perfectly happy to "do her cards" while we waited in restaurants, and she was super excited when I proposed that she take her first "quiz" while we were killing time at the hotel one evening.
We spent lots of time at the hotel pool, but unfortunately there aren't any photos of that because I wasn't about to get the camera anywhere near Little Miss Splashes For No Reason Whatsoever. I can highly recommend that parents of preschoolers find hotels with indoor pools whenever they go on vacation. Not only does it give you something to fill the dreaded two hours between dinner and bedtime (when the kid is tired, you're tired, all the playgrounds are closed, and there's nothing on television that you'd let them watch), but it also makes a great threat to enforce good behavior. "Sit down in that chair this minute or we're not going in the pool when we get back to the hotel" is remarkably effective, especially when the kid knows you're just mean enough to follow through on the threat.

What with everyone having babies within a day or two of our arrival, the schedule was a bit, um, flexible, but we managed to catch up with many of our Richmond friends. Here's Liza and her cohorts trying to trick the geese into thinking that the grass they're throwing is actually something tasty.

Liza and I made it up to the geese on a later visit with Cheerios purloined from our hotel's breakfast buffet. That's another thing I'd recommend to other parents - snagging extra stuff from the buffet to use later in the day. Liza is notoriously picky in restaurants, ordering food and then not eating it and then complaining of hunger later on. I knew she wasn't going to eat anything at the Thai place, so I brought a yogurt and an apple from the buffet, and she was perfectly happy to eat those while I had my spicy pineapple chicken. Mmmmm .... spicy pineapple chicken ....

The last day of the trip was busy. We stopped at the Newport Aquarium on our way through Cincinnati, and it was totally worth the lines and the crowd inside at the main exhibits. Why? Because I shelled out the extra cash so we could pet the penguins.

Yes, I said pet the penguins. As in, those adorable little fishy-smelling beasties in tuxedos were actually willing to be handled (gently) by strangers. And my adorable little yogurt-smelling beastie managed to hold off her naptime tantrums long enough to make it through the whole thing without startling the little guys. She thought it was cool, but I don't think she understands what a rare treat this was. After all, Mr. Rogers got to do it, and now we just pulled in off the highway and petted them, so how special could it be?

Speaking of special, the final reason we went down to Kentucky was to get Liza's portrait done at the place that's done all of her past photos. Remember how I was joking about going back down there to get future ones done? Not really joking.

The proofs from that should be up by the end of the week, so I'll link so everyone can see how absolutely freaking incredibly awesomely well the kid did. In the meantime, while I was cruising around the studio's site, I found that one of Liza's earlier shots is in their advertising portfolio (scroll down, she's on the right side). How cool is that? Not as cool as petting a penguin, but still - it's pretty chilly.