National Zoo visit

John thinks that we should have Oscar send post cards to his school

from sabbatical after reading the above comments in the blog.  He may be right, right amount of room to write his thoughts on and he likes pictures way more and picked the ones in the blog for the most part.  We slept late again and while I thought that we

should probably start getting on a better schedule to get out early on Friday and Saturday, I didn’t have the heart to wake up Oscar when he was sleeping so soundly after just worrying that he was working on pneumonia.  So, we took our time getting up and then got on the metro to go

to the National Zoo.  There are two stops for the Zoo according to their own website, one is an uphill walk to the zoo and the other is not.  So, I went for that one even though all the other parents with strollers (smart that) got off at Woodley Park, we went on to Cleveland Park and passed a bakery on the way.  I got tuna fish and then screwed that up by treating myself to a croissant that wasn’t good enough to make the guilt go away.

     Oscar ate a huge chocolate chip cookie and I’m pretty sure had no guilt.  We got to the zoo and got a stroller first

 thing.  While Oscar kept trying to jump out all the time and walk, I reminded him that he would be tired later and not able to be in a stroller, so he would jump back in pretty quick except for all the times that we had to park the stroller anyway and walk through

 buildings.  My fitbit went crazy while we were still at the zoo, so it’s really going to think that I have changed my lifestyle, but will be surprised to find out I’m still lazy when I return to Michigan.  That National Zoo is very long and the most exciting part to me 

 was the reptile house.  Not only could you find most of the reptiles when normally you never see them, but the house itself was beautiful.  I took more pictures of the outside than the animals inside.  Along with a strange crocodile with a thin snout, the orangutan babies

     and lions that you could hearing roaring, it was a good visit.  Made that much better for being free.  Lots of people were clearly just strolling their strollers through the park because it was on their way to somewhere else.  I can’t imagine just being able to stroll through a zoo any day you wish in your backyard.  We went and saw the pandas and they were cute,

but the amount of large adults that were just lounging at the railings and not moving throughout the time that we were in the panda house was very annoying to me.  There were all these tiny kids (mine included) who are half

their size that all the adults could have seen over very easily that were basically locked out of seeing the bears.  I know there is some kind of weird fascination with pandas that expands past other wild animals in zoos (which I don’t get by the way), but let the tiny children in by the rail people.  More fascinating was the huge bank of tvs that are the cameras that are always on the pandas and being manned by a keeper.  Oscar thought that was neat and you could see the pandas without any problem here.