Year 03

Do you know how hard it is to find a petting zoo?  Well, a good one?  Ian and I went down to the Battle Creek Binder Park Zoo where they do have one and Ian had a blast with the children’s zoo.  There were all kinds of animals to pet, but Ian loved getting in with the goats and feeding them.  He was able to get right up to them and pet them to his hearts content.  Of course, the goats did mob him when they realized he had food, but Ian just started giggling like there was no tomorrow.

While we were there, we also got to feed and pet the giraffes Binder has in their African Safari section.  We even got to see the baby giraffe that was recently born (he was soo cute).  I do have to say that I like the Binder Park Giraffe feeding area more than the Detroit Zoos.  At Binder, you can feed the giraffes as much as you want and as long as the giraffes will let you.

Overall, it was a great day to be at Binder Park and Ian had a blast.  We’ll have to go back sometime soon.

Yes, we took the little monkey bowling yesterday and Ian loved it!  We only ended up doing one game, but it went really well.  A lot better than I thought it would.  Ian did get a little bored with it, but only when he wasn’t waiting for his turn (mama and daddy bowled too).

We had actually thought of going in the morning, but the bowling alley opened later than I thought and Ian was so upset when we left the first time.  He wanted to go bumper bowling and was singing the “bumper bowling” song on the way there.  When we made it back there after his nap, he was thrilled.  He was checking out everything and was really excited about the whole thing.

Ian got to wear the required ugly bowling shoes and picked out his own ball – a nice 6 pounder.  Ian did the first ball on his own; I think it made it halfway down the lane, but you should have seen him jumping with enthusiasm that it even went.  After that, Jesse helped Ian push the ball down the lane.  I helped for one round, but since I didn’t help get Ian many pins, Jesse took over after that.  The two of them were so adorable when they went to push the ball.  Ian had to stay up near the line until the ball went crashing through the pins.  Then he would hop around, skip back to the balls and wait for it to return to him.  During it all, he had the biggest grin on his face.

When it wasn’t Ian’s turn, he was all about helping us with our own bowls.  He kept forgetting there was a step between the lanes and the ball holder, so he dropped them a few times, but he never got hurt.  Overall, the afternoon was a blast and Jesse had a grin on for most of it as well.  The only time Jesse frowned was right after his turn – he really liked the gutters.  :)  That was actually really nice though.  When we were entering all the names into the machine, we were able to indicate that Ian needed the bumpers and we didn’t.  So the bumpers only popped up when it was Ian’s turn.  I like that.

So that was the big excitement for this weekend.  When I said Ian did well, I wasn’t kidding.  He scored higher than either Jesse or I.  Ian had a great score of 80, with me behind him at 74 and Jesse rounded us out with a solid 50.  Like I said, it wasn’t the greatest game with a combined score of 204, but both Ian and Jesse had a blast.  We will be doing this again, but we’ll probably wait a couple of weeks so Ian doesn’t get burned out on it.

For more bowling pictures, click here.