Lions and Giraffes and Telescopes - Oh My!

Exhibit #1: Yes, Daddy is able to put family ahead of the Green Bay Packers (at least for one, possibly even two games per season)



Exhibit #2: Yes, you can build a world-class zoo filled with all kinds of animals, some you've never ever heard of, much less seen, but the 2-year-olds will always be most impressed with the things they can climb on, manipulate (like the 25-cents-per-view "zoo telescope" above), or hide within (like the five-dollar (!) zoo-themed photo booths).

This Sunday, thanks to our good friends Seth and Gillian, was Zoo Day. They were nice enough to share guest passes to the Los Angeles Zoo and invite us along on their animal adventure. Our first stop was Millie's for breakfast -- a Silver Lake diner where Lydia and I often ate breakfast when she lived nearby. Next, we raced to the Zoo so we could meet Jonah (and his parents, the aforementioned very-generous Gillian and Seth) to walk with him through the Zoo. But we were also meeting our good friend Norma, her mother, and her little girl, Olivia. Together, we formed one great expedition that saw elephants, gerenuks, giraffes, lions, flamingos, red apes, tigers, chimpanzees, and gorillas.

As I mentioned, Spencer did take notice of many of the animals but his special attention was reserved for the telescopes, the photo booths, and the signs. It was very cute when he and Jonah walked up to an ubiquitous sign in the park that showed a circle with a slash through it over an open animal-mouth and a hand dangling a morsel of food just above it. "That says, DON'T. FEED. THE ANIMALS,'" Spencer told Jonah (and us all) on our fourth or fifth encounter with the sign.

There's only so much of the Zoo you can see before nap time. We will still have a lot to explore the next time we go there...if we can pry ourselves away from the telescopes and the photo booths.