Vacation update

Well, we're back to modern living after a 36 hour technology drought. I packed up the kids and headed to Grandma & Papa's house yesterday for a leisurely day of floating in the pool and playing with tinker toys. It was heavenly! We went planning to stay overnight. B come over after work so the two of us could have "date night." What with the kids going to bed there and us not having to worry about getting a babysitter home at a reasonable hour, we could party as late as we pleased. So we went crazy and stayed out until 10:45. (If I'm not mistaken, that's earlier than my curfew in high school.) Nothing like not sleeping through the night once in the past 4 years to make going to bed seem more exciting than anything going on around town!

My parents, the honorable people that they are, have chosen to spend their money more wisely than we have. They do not have cable TV and they have internet access via a dial-up modem. Groan. Since I'm normally on my computer dozens of times a day, it was a bit of a change of pace.

No cable and no internet means no weather channel and no weather.com -- which probably explains how I managed to choose today, the most miserably hot day of this week, to take the kids to the zoo. We saw lions and tigers and monkeys lying listlessly, belly-up, in whatever shade they could find. It's pretty bad when it's too hot even for the African animals! They looked as wiped out as we felt.

The kids loved it despite the heat. H tried to talk to lots of the animals. The only animal languages she's learned yet are feline and bovine, and generally she prefers feline. We'd say, "look at the camels!" And she'd point to them and say, "meow!" "Look, an anteater!" "Meow!"

J loved pretty much everything except the reptile house. It's not that he has a problem with reptiles in general. Going in there was, after all, his idea. (I certainly didn't suggest it.) The problem was, it happened to be feeding time for one of the snakes while we were there. He had just started in on a very large white rat. The head was already down the gullet, but the rest of him was still visible. My tenderhearted boy was pretty upset on behalf of the rat. When we got home he told me that we should go back and tell the zookeeper to feed the snake crackers instead. I'd rather tell the zookeeper to feed it nothing at all.

Did I mention it's supposed to be a high of 75 tomorrow? Or so I heard on the weather channel this evening when we got home.


--My sincere apologies to my mother for this post - first for insulting her internet access, then for discussing snakes which will no doubt cause her nightmares. But she probably won't see it until next week when she's back at our house and can surf the web :)