Denver Zoo

September 17th, we went to the Denver Zoo. When Ellie loves animals so much, we thought it would be great. (Yes we know she won't remember it, but we will.)

We got there and ate lunch. We left home as soon as Jake was done with class so none of us had eaten yet. It was also nice because it gave us some time to look over the map and the activities to come up with a game plan. Once lunch was done, we headed over to the lion cage. There is a little house for the lion cage and also the hyenas/wild dogs. (They are improving parts of the zoo so animals share time in the outdoor areas sometimes.)

The first activity was feeding a bone to the lion and scraps and blood-cicles to the wild dogs. A zoo person came and explained what would happen then another person started throwing the items off the top of the house. The animals have great internal clocks. They became more active and watching the top of the house about 5 minutes before it started. They had to remove the lionesses from the lion cage because apparently the lions don't share well.

We continued wandering around to the rest of the cat cages; leopard, panthers, tigers, etc. It was interesting to see that the tigers had a liter of 4 cubs. They were really cute. (There are 2 of them wrestling in the background of the picture. The mom just paced in front of the window where all the people were watching.)

We walked past the elephants and giraffes on our way to the sea lion show. It was just a simple demonstration about what sea lions are taught and how they are taught to do those things. Ellie loved waving when the sea lion would swim by.

After watching the show, we walked over to the sea lion pool to see the new baby sea lion. The baby was adorable. It would just sit on the rock. If it tried to get in the water, the mom would swim over, then the cub would sit still. After about a minute, the cub started placing it's nose in the water and would blow bubbles. Then it would flip water with its flipper. We could have just sat there for hours and watched the little guy.

We walked around and saw the giraffes again and the hippos and some other weird looking animals. We were on our way to the penguin show. The zoo guy explained that the birds had colored bands on right or left flipper, depending on gender, and the colors indicated what year they were born. They do this because there is no way other than blood tests to determine gender. They had actually guessed wrong on 1-2 of the newborns this year and will have to switch the bands.

As we were watching the penguins, Jake is holding Ellie so she could see the penguins eating. All the sudden he says, "I think she just peed." Not thinking anything about it, I said, "OK. We'll find a bathroom and change her." I then noticed a small splash by my foot. Yes, Ellie had leaked through her diaper. Apparently kids pee a lot more when given plenty of water to make sure they aren't dehydrated. It had only been 2-3 hours since her last diaper change so it was a surprise. At least I knew she wouldn't be dehydrated.

Unfortunately her pants were all wet. So I washed them out in the bathroom sink and she went pant less through the rest of the zoo. We did reapply sunscreen to her legs. No need to burn those cute chubby legs.

We walked through the bird house and then started for the primate walk. Sadly all the primates, although they had huge outdoor areas, were inside. These cute little guys have the greatest mustaches.

The gorillas were all up high eating hay when we got there and didn't hold Ellie's interest. The orangutan's had a new baby as well. We didn't get a good picture of the baby because mom was very protective. At one point, she walked the baby to the back corner, fluffed up the straw, and wrapped the baby in the potato sack blanket that was in there. Then she picked up the entire package (with the baby inside) and moved it to another location. When the baby would crawl out, mom would come over and put it back in.

Notice no pants. It was a short but fun visit. Some of the exhibits were weird because of the habitat sharing but they were working on improvements. By the end of 2011/beginning of 2012 they plan to finish the new Asian habitat and shift the animals back around.

At the end we wandered into the gift shop and of course Ellie had to pick up every stuffed animal she could get her hands on and cuddled it and AAAHHH!!! Since there was no afternoon nap, she was asleep before we pulled out of the parking lot.