Zoo with Aunt Jenn

What do you do when your own children are on vacation? Borrow someone else's, of course! I took my three nieces to the Philadelphia Zoo for a day trip. We started out stuck in traffic. There was construction on both the Schuylkill and the Turnpike. So when we got to the zoo, what did we do first? Got up in the zoo balloon for a bird's eye traffic view, naturally. Actually, it looked like traffic had gotten much better from up there.
Faith hated the balloon and spent her time looking at her feet and holding on with both hands for dear life. Juli had her eyes glued to the toddler-height holes in the basket. Hannah loved it, although this picture doesn't really show it - she looks slightly ill, but she wasn't. In fact, she wanted to stay up there all day.
We started through the zoo in search of actual animals. That lasted for a little while. We saw this turtle looking at us.

But then everyone was DYING of hunger and thirst so we stopped for lunch. After lunch, we headed to Big Cat Falls. This puma looks like he's waving hello, doesn't he?

But animals alone couldn't hold the girls' interest for long. We had to seek out rides. So we rode the carousel.

And the draft horses.

And the train.

And I suggested we look at animals. But we rode the ponies.

And petted the goats.

And rode the camel.

By then everyone was tired. So we took an ice cream break. Which took forever. Because "Make it REALLY small" doesn't seem to mean much to ice cream swirling zoo employees. I appreciate that they wanted to give me my $4 worth, I really do. But when a 3 and 5 year old get ice creams bigger than their heads, nothing good can possibly happen.

Anyway, then we saw a few animals. What's kind of cool is that I didn't even know the giraffe on the right was pregnant - but she gave birth the very next day!

We had to stop to see the polar bear, too.

At this point, we were going to be late to get Scott, and I was starting to worry about the traffic on the way home. But I had kept saying "later" when we passed face painting stands. And this was as "later" as it was going to get. So we stopped to acquire one tiger...

One princess...

And one butterfly on the way out.

I'm told that they didn't wash them off for days. But that's Mom and Dad's problem - the best thing about being Aunt Jenn is dropping them off at home when you're tired!