Happy New Year, everyone!
We celebrated in grand style last night by playing Wild Life, a game Nick got for Christmas. There are four different zoos to choose from, and you travel around the world collecting all the animals in your zoo. Whoever gets all their animals first, wins! It started out with everyone playing, but first Chris went to bed, then Nick got too interested looking at the atlas Chris pulled out earlier to play. I even had to take over his Banker duties. Then Noah didn't want to play, then Sophie quit, so soon it was just down to Sarah and me. But see, we wanted to keep playing because we were both really close to winning! So we persevered (sp?) for another 20 minutes or so until I got my last animal, and she crossed start and got her last animal on the very next turn. We called it a tie and then went on to a rousing game of Harry Potter Uno. Everyone joined in and this time Nick won, followed by Sarah. The kids always like to keep playing until everyone has gotten rid of their cards, but it just kept going on and on and on and on, so I finally called time out with a three-way tie for third (last) place. We then toasted in the New Year with sparkling grape juice in our "cheer" cups, as the girls call them, and sent all the kids to bed. They stayed up until about 9:30-10 and were so excited to be still awake!
This morning, they all stumbled out of bed at 8:00, a whole hour later than normal. And spent the first morning of the new year watching Scooby Doo cartoons in English on the Boomerang channel. The boys enjoyed a breakfast of Peanut Butter Capt'n Crunch, thanks to Uncle Pete and Aunt Colleen. Thanks guys! In fact, Noah loves it so much he asked to have it for lunch too. I let him, it's a holiday after all.
After breakfast it was off to the zoo. We have year passes, which is really fun for days like today. We only wanted to see the animals housed in the two big buildings since it is winter, after all. We went to the Masoala Halle first, which is a reproduction of the Masoala Rainforest in Madagascar. It was quite a change going from -2 Celsius to a balmy 30 Celsius. Fortunately, they had lockers were we could store our coats. The best part was Sophie's hair going totally curly from the humidity, and the camera getting condensation all over the lense. After the camera finally got acclimatized, I was able to take the photos posted at right. We only saw one lemur this time, instead of the happy family we saw last trip, but we still had fun.
We also lucked out in the timing. Today was the big penguin parade. We thought for sure we wouldn't be able to see anything, there were so many people gathered around the penguin encounter as we came walking up. But then the zookeeper had everyone move back and form two separate groups. When they say penguin parade, they mean penguin parade. They walked those penguins right down the middle of the road, right past the kids, and up through the zoo. Anyone who wanted to was welcome to follow behind. There was about 6 inches max between Sarah and Sophie and the penguins. They waddled so cute! And after that we left since neither Chris or I had brought mittens. (Did I mention it was -2?) :)
We hope you all had a great and safe holiday as well. And that this New Year brings more good things than bad.