Week Ending: Zoo Edition

This weekend Patrick has been turning everything into a walker.  He pushes the girls' pink princess castle across the room, walking with it.  He refuses to spend a moment inside the exersaucer Nani got him, but he stands on the outside and plays and pushes it around the room walking behind it with stumbly little steps.  He's on his way to being an even bigger boy.  He turned ten months old yesterday, which would put him at the age that Mae took her first steps (she started really walking all over the place on her first birthday).  Since he's already into everything, I'm not quite as unexcited about the whole walking thing as I was about the whole crawling thing (it's not like I can put him in one place and he'll stay there!):

 For our Field Trip Friday we went to the Zoo.  We stopped off at the playground outside the zoo first and I had a little talk with Mae.  You run off and we leave.  After leaving several playgrounds the first time she tried to bolt, she's starting to learn that maybe just playing in the play area isn't that bad of an idea:

It gave them a chance to get their wiggles out after a long Thursday in the house:

Maggie is a huge fan of this necklace.  It's become one of her favorite things, on par with her red boots:

 I love this picture!

And this one! She's becoming such a big girl:

 When we went into the zoo the otters were playing and kept coming right up to the girls to see them.  Maggie was very excited.  She'd never even paid attention to them when she'd come in the past, but they were so playful they were impossible to ignore!

 Although her favorite thing in the entire zoo?  The overgrown feeder fish that were in with the turtles in the reptile and bird room.  I kept trying to convince the girls to come over and look at  the exotic birds and snakes ("Look a python!") and they just wanted to stand and look at the gold fish.

There's an awesome "Zoo's Back Yard" area that they played in:

Maggie got to steer the club house!

And Sadie determined that her arms are wider than a crow's but not quite as big as a red tail hawks wingspan.

When she saw the first peacock we ran into at the zoo she said: "Look!  Pavo Cristatus!"   (a few months ago when we went to the zoo I read her the sign which had the Latin name).  She followed it up by saying "kong que" from a little chinese children's dictionary one of my best friends from college gave her this Christmas.  She is slightly obsessed with peacocks (and swans).

Past zoo visits also meant she could lament that they only let people ride the dromedary camels, and she'd really like to ride a bactrian camel (disappointment of the day was that there were no camels to ride at all):

And she was pleased to finally find the swan sign (made of bottle caps) that she'd been talking about non stop:

Boomer just won't stop growing and acting like a big boy:

Here he is having a tantrum.  He was furious that I turned my phone off before letting him play with it.  He can get past the child lock... and shortly after this picture managed to turn it back on:

Here we are after Mass.  Well.  Everyone's kind of facing the camera.  And this is pretty much as good as it gets:

 I am incredibly excited about this.  I found these storage boxes/ottomans at Target yesterday. I had a credit card rewards gift card... and they were on clearance for $9-something.  I  had instant organization ideas that I quickly put into play.  Of course, not before Sadie and Maggie played in them:

The big boy had other ideas about what was fun.  He stole a package of wipes and started waving them around:

We celebrated the Feast of the Nativity of Mary with cupcakes (Patrick got one that was unfrosted and threw it on the ground, offended at the idea of food... he's still not quite on board with the whole "eating" thing yet):

Once the kids were in bed and Paul was gone I decided to "just clean up" the living room.  I do this every night and I had resolved not to deep clean on Sunday... but then this happened.  And my living room does look much, much better as a result.  I'm hoping this makes nightly cleaning easier:

And here they are closed!  Well worth the $9 a piece!  

For more Week Ending head over to Re-inventing Mother!  I hope you had a great weekend!