A Safari with My Son

On September 19th, I drove Little Man to school so that we could go on his first field trip. I wanted to be a parent chaperon so I could see how they operate and spend some time with Little Man. He was a little sad when he got on the bus and realized I wasn't going to get on with him, he actually thought I was leaving him and started crying thinking we weren't going to have our animal trip. But after I filled up on gas, got in the back of the bus motorcade and drove 40 minutes we got to the Lazy 5 Ranch, a drive-thru safari.

I didn't quite know what to expect of the drive-thru safari, I thought we would be on the bus, but instead after potty breaks we walked to the barn and got onto 2 big wagons each drawn by 3 horses each. We settled in...

...and were excited to see a whole bunch of cute animals waiting for the food we were given to feed them...

and then...

OH.MY.GOODNESS! The animals were up by us and were all trying to get at us and the food! Definitely NOT expecting that! But I took a deep breath and fed some of the animals FROM MY HAND so that I wouldn't be the lame Mommy while all the Dads were so gung-ho. Of course, after each time I was slimed down with saliva and chewed food remnants I broke out an anti-bacterial wipe to wipe it off :) Little Man didn't want to feed the animals from his hand (Isn't he soooo smart?!?), so he jumped and a bucket of feed was knocked to the floor of our wagon. One of the elk dang near climbed in (the white one) and got WAY too close for comfort...quite an adventure! Some of the animals even put their front hooves on the bottom step of the wagon and walked with just their back hooves on the ground...they really wanted that feed. For the next hour and a half or so we rode around and saw baby animals, ostriches, a zebra, a rhinoceros, Little Man fed a giraffe while I held him (hence no photo), and we saw buffalo and lots more. We went up and down the terrain and enjoyed some great weather.

Afterwards, the kids ate lunch and then played at the playground before loading the buses back up to go back to the center. Little Man and I had plenty of stories for Hubby that night...and since it was such a long story I'll wait until my next post to show you the Baby Surprise Jacket progress and to start with our vacation chronicles!