The Zoo

The Wildlife Zoo

I got a buy one get one free coupon from work to go to the wildlife world zoo. It's a smaller, family owned zoo about twenty minutes away. I like it better than the Phoenix Zoo, you can get a lot closer to the animals and it's small enough that you actually get to see everything!

It made me laugh to see the peacock sitting on it's own sign!

This is an albino Wallaby.....looks like a giant white rat, doesn't it?

These are giant porcupine, they were really big!

Side story: I've had my camera for a year and have take a ton of pictures! I mean seriously, the camera comes with me every where! It has a pretty good zoom but not great, anyway, I went to zoom in on the giant porcupines and the camera made a funny sound and suddenly the screen was a blur of gray! I actually had to zoom OUT to get this next picture!! I discovered that unbeknownest to me, my camera has SUPER ZOOM! Awesome!!!

Up close and personal with the baby giant porcupine!

The Zoo has a walk in Aviary, I took a picture of this bright little bird with my SUPER ZOOM!

These two birds were touring the aviary with us.....until I ran after them trying to take this picture!

The Galapagoes Turtles were busy digging a massive hole in their enclosure.

My absolute favorite part of this zoo are the Giraffes! They built a large platform that extends into the giraffe encloser and you get to feed them!! Here's David feeding his first giraffe!

This giraffe was extremely tall! Usually, they have to really stretch their necks and tounges and you have to lean your body half way over the rail to give them the food. I actually reached out and touched his nose!

Apparently he thought that was gross because he immediatly went to work cleaning it!

He decided he was full and left us....off in the upper right hand corner you can see another giraffe.

Ta Da....here's a picture of the elusive giraffe thanks to SUPER ZOOM!

There was also a baby giraffe...so cute! This is a picture with regular zoom..

And this is a picture with SUPER ZOOM!

There were a lot of baby animals, here's a momma warthog and her little ones.

For a worthog, the baby's pretty cute!

Zebras were so close we didn't need to zoom!

They're so pretty!

We didn't need to use zoom on the rhino either, which was kind of disturbing, especially considering that the only thing between us were two waist high wood fences! The rhino was really BIG!

This is a leopard! Just beautiful!

We went to the zoo at the perfect time, all of the animals were awake and moving around, it was really cool!

They had two white tigers that were just beautiful!

I've never seen one so close before!

Are you ready for the cutest thing ever?

They were watching the white tigers play, we couldn't get them to turn around but still.....the white dots on thier ears are so cute!

We went into the reptile house, this python marks the halfway point. We were staning and watching him reach up to the ceiling when we suddenly realized........there's no glass!!! David wasn't too excited about that since he had a friend that was killed by a pet python! Seriously!

My other favorite thing about this zoo is the Lorey feeding. On this day I was the only person, beside the worker, feeding the birds. David's back was hurting him so he sat out and took pictures as I was mobbed by the birds!

The End

Halloween

Halloween Party

Most of you have seen Mom's blog so you know we had a Halloween Party for Alanna, but I'm going to post some pictures anyway. David and I were in the grocery store and I saw a magazine that featured these cupcakes. I just had to make them for the party!

The graveyard cupcakes used a milano cookie cut in half, jelly belly's for rocks and mini choc. chips for the path way.

The pumpkin cupcakes used mini choc. chips for the face and piece of a sour straw.

The purple monsters were my favorite! I used a frosting tip that I normally use for grass to make the fur, half a marshmellow for the eye and "glued" a M&M on for a pupil. They're so cool!

This is a seven layer dip that we decorated to look like a graveyard. We used melba toast for the head stones and decorated each grave with olives or tomatoes.

Here's the spread. Aside from the cupcakes and dip we had mummy rice crispy treats and root beer with dry ice.

Here's Mom and Alanna playing mummy wrap with toilet paper.

David and I played too! I'm wearing the pirate costume that I wore to work.

We filled up the great tub and went bobbing for apples. Alanna had a hard time figuring it out and ended up soaking wet!

Then the girls played twister. This is Jennifer and Hannah, Alanna's other friend Angie was the undisputed queen of twister.

Pumpkins

David and I found two humongous pumpkins and carved them. This is him being annoyed because I had to take three pictures before I got one that was blurry!

This is my pumpkin, it turned out really cool. I had the hardest time taking a pic of it in the dark. I wanted to get a pic of it lite, so I turned the flash off, but apparently with no flash the pic is exposed longer so the slightest vibration makes everything blurry. I think I took about fifty pics before I finally got one that was decent!

Here's David's cool skull carving. The pic doesn't do it justice

The scary face pumpkin is Alanna's. They all turned out really neat!

They're lined up along the path to our front door.

Halloween Night

Devon was so adorable in his lion costume! We put him on the floor and he crawled around growling, it was so cute!

Alanna dressed up as an eighties chick, which is really sad because I was one! Her friend Angie went as Japanese girl. The whole night people kept asking what she was! I thought it was pretty obvious but I guess not!

Ashley dressed up as a cat....

...and so did Regen! She was just the cutest thing!

This the front of the house all decorated with glow in the dark spider webs and fountain. We also had a stobe light, fog machine and spooky music. I was pretty cool!

This is the fountain that Dad crafted out of a styrofoam skull from Wal-mart, a pvc pipe and some food coloring! It was probably the coolest thing I've ever seen!

We bought a massive amount of candy because we always have a ton of trick-or-treaters!

And yes, this is the same tub that we bopped for apples in. It was so heavy I could barely lift it!

One of our first trick-or-treaters was Samantha, one of Mom's daycare kids who came dressed up as a character on doodlebop. I love the wig!

I went walking around the block with Alanna and Angie and we came back to the house for a break and couldn't even get to the front door because there were so many trick-or-treaters! Our house was the coolest on the block by far! In fact, when I was giving out candy, there were a couple little and older kids who wouldn't come up because it was too spooky!

While we were waiting for the crowd to clear so we could get in the house this kid walked past me. I thought it was a really cool mask so I took a pic!
Alanna and Angie wanted to go down a couple other streets so we jumped in the van and I drove them around. David was going to go with us but he got stuck working on someone's computer until about 8:30. While we were out I saw someone dressed up as Michael from the Halloween movies, David's favorite, so I tried to take a pic through the windshield, it didn't work very well.
He was kind enough to give me a better view! Alanna and Angie were freaking out, it was great!
On another street we passed another Michael and a creepy skeleton guy. I turned the car around, rolled down my window and did a drive by shooting!