So this year, my kids have to spring breaks: Easter in March and Passover in April. Makes for a very strange Spring. They started their vacation on Wednesday and they are off through the Monday after Easter. I guess Danny decided he needed an Easter break also so he took vacation Thursday through Monday. The boys spent the first two days with Emily making cookies, having lunch at McDonald’s and playing in the play area, playing video games, reading books and just plain having fun. I took off from work on Friday and we all went to the Bronx zoo. It was a tad chilly, especially when the wind kicked up, but otherwise a nice sunny day. Before we went to the zoo, we checked out the zoo’s website and saw that a baby monkey was born the end of January. Of course, the zoo’s Easter events were taking place over the weekend when we weren’t going to be there.

The first place we visited was the birds, mainly because it was indoors (and warm!). It’s not exactly easy to find all those little birds amongst the tree limbs and leaves in each exhibit. It’s kind of like playing I Spy, which happens to be one of Ryan’s favorite games. Next, we decided to explore the tiger exhibit. It was a nice big tiger planted right in front of the glass. The kids were laughing because it had its butt up against the glass. The exhibit was geared towards tiger conservation. One of the signs indicated that there are only 5000 tigers left in the wild – which really gives you a moment’s pause. That is not alot of tigers and it also indicated that there were some countries that the people were so poor they sold tiger parts for salt. Can you imagine?

We decided to stop for a lunch break and grabbed a couple of pretzels. After munching on them, we went to the reptile house. This place was steamy – apparently the snakes, lizards and turtles like it hot. In addition, the zoo staff had not yet been on poop patrol because the snake exhibits were chock full of snake shit. What goes in must come out! Ryan is infatuated with snakes so this was one of his favorite exhibits. After this, we went to the mouse House. As we open the doors we were overwhelmed with such a stench. I couldn’t put my finger on it but I knew that I recognize that smell. It wasn’t until some lady said “skunk” then I realized that the stink was exactly that. And there it was, white in front of us, a big fat white and black smelly skunk. I was almost crawling up the walls at the site of all the rodents scurrying about. We escaped fairly quickly and the kids decided they wanted to take a ride on the bug carousel. We got such a nice picture of the boys on the carousel with Danny standing between them. The zoo got smart and hired photographers to take pictures and then sell the photographs. we actually ended up with three very nice photos as Ryan figured out how to look at the camera and smile. Here are the pics:

Of course we needed some souvenirs so we stopped at the gift shop and Ryan acquired another snake and Matty got an adorable tiger (of course there were more items but I am trying to keep this brief). On the way out we visited the monkey House. It always amazes me how much these little monkeys look like little people because of their human expressions. It is somewhat disconcerting at times. We looked for the Titi monkey family and luckily found them. Surprisingly, the suit did not advertise that there was a new baby.

On the way home we also stopped at Arthur Avenue but boy was it jammed! We should’ve figured that on Good Friday it was going to be packed. While we were unable to get into our favorite stores, we were at least fortunate enough to pick up some cannolis and Easter pie. We had a little traffic on the way home but all in all it was a very fun day.