Then we went to our cousin's house and had a birthday dinner. Cheers!!
Em was pretty proud of her card - notice how she spelled 'happy', 'hape'...totally correct phonics...good girl! :-)
And J was pretty stoked to get some spending cash!
Congrats big, little man!
Of course there were ice cream sundaes for the celebration!
The next morning we headed out to the Living Desert for a trip to the zoo. We definitely saw the jaguar - we watched him grab his food from the water and guard it carefully from us.
By the time I figured out to put the kids in the picture, he was far away, but they were still awestruck.
We also got to see the cheetah get her wellness check.
One of the big highlights was feeding the giraffes.
I HAD to put this entire sequence in. I know it is a lot of pictures, but if you watch K and J as the carrot comes into the picture and the tongue comes out, it is pretty humorous.
K catches sight of the tongue...
J starts getting pushed out of the way...
And it ends in giggles and laughs...
After lunch, the kids got to dig for fossils.
And Em got to be ferocious in guarding her eggs. Roar!
They have the most amazing, real looking dinosaurs I have seen in a long time. The girls were fascinated by them. K wants to know how they make them look so real and Em just wants to know how they make them move and talk...a lesson for another day. Today was just to enjoy.
When the girls started to fade, we jumped on the carousel for one last ride.
When we got back, K took a nap - a three hour nap - and when she woke up coughing and looking miserable, consensus said to take her to urgent care - trip number two (I had taken Em already but she hadn't had enough symptoms to say she had anything serious so they had sent me off saying it was 'just a cold'). Little did they know,two days later, K was diagnosed with 'a touch' of pneumonia (there was fluid on the right side of her right lung). She was given a shot and a z-pack. Auntie K and I were marveling about it later - how could she wander around the hot desert all day w pneumonia and still look so cute in all the pictures? :-) One thing I know, I don't give her enough credit for how well she does when she doesn't feel well. Sure she was way crankier than normal and not very upbeat, but, well, if I felt like that, I would have been far worse! I had walking pneumonia once in college and I was miserable.
Anyway, when I asked about the other kids, the only advice from the doctor was that K not sleep in the same room as any other kids...ummm, okay, so what about the four nights her sister and I had been sleeping face-to-face with her? And off we headed, back to Jini's.
