Pictures!

Tell Blondiekins that she is the most awesome niece EVER. I hope her teachers were suitably dazzled by her brilliance! I hope school gets more interesting soon; Have you told her the reason she's bored is because she's just so smart?

We went to the San Antonio Zoo several years ago, when Mina was little, and it was HORRIBLE. Every other enclosure was empty, there were no birds, the monkeys were old and depressed...It was bad. They've made signifigant improvements since then.
Here's our favorite animal, LaVerne:



She's a nice, polite goat. This is Mindy, who will sneak up on you and knife you in the back for a goat treat. Seriously.



There are about ten goats altogether, but the others are pretty non-descript.

Here is one of the black panthers (they bill them as 'black jaguars) wandering around. Normally they just lay there whining about the heat, but we went on a nice drizzly day and all the animals were up and about.



Here's one of the warthogs. This is the first time the kids got to see one, because normally they're all buried nostril deep in their mud pit. The Twin got a book awhile back called 'A Kiss for a Warthog', that had really cutesy drawings in it, so she couldn't understand why nobody would kiss the warthog; well, now she knows.






Here's the elephant with highly visible 'nibbles', as the Twin pointed out. We got to see her pick up a few tiny little seeds off the ground and eat them. You always hear about how dextrous their trunks are, but I had never realized how much like fingers those little pro-tubers on the end are.



Ducky's favorite animal is the 'High-NO'! She learned what they were by seeing a picture of a blue one on the propane tank canisters outside of Wal Mart. This is the animal she always wants to see.



I don't know, that's the skinniest darn Rhino I've ever seen. There's another one that's healthier-looking, but he was lying down that day, enjoying a little pool of mucky rain on the floor.



Here we are being Nile Crocodiles. Sometimes they lay facing the glass, opening and closing their jaws very slowly. The kids love this.



The hippos are not quite as cool as the High-nos.



Rocket really enjoys the aviary, because it has a giant replica of an extinct 'Elephant Bird' egg. It's a neat little building, theres some birds flying around loose. They live in a little indoor forest and if you go on a day when there are no other people, they will walk right up and stare at you.



I can't remember what these are called, but they were being all cute that day. Probably to make up for the fact that there was a mutilated bird in there with them last time.



And here's Ducky and Spiderman riding Swiper. I think they missed each other.