A Rainbow of Flavors

Too much cotton candy. Or maybe it was the snow cones. All I know is that my children have had too much sugar this week, ingested in a variety of very odd colors. I will not tell you details of how I came to realize that there had been too much food coloring in Stomper's digestive track, I'll just say I saw blue. That's all I'll say.

Our local Elementary school let out this week, and so of course there was a carnival to attend. It was pretty much in our back yard (just over the fence) and so it was an easy walk to make. I joined my friend Emily and her three boys, where we tried to keep track of all five kids for an hour or so. After our two toddlers got way too frustrating to try to corral, we decided to divide and conquer. She took the big boys and stayed at the carnival while I took the two toddlers home to my house. A good plan. Her little 2 year old and my almost-3 year old and I sat in the grass in front of our house for almost an hour playing. It was actually a pretty warm night - the rest of the day had been rainy and chilly, a weather pattern that has been dampening both our valley (yay!) and my spirits (boo!) all spring long.



Another exciting event of the week was the opening of the new carousel at the zoo. Now, if I had my way, I would have preferred that the zoo put maybe some new animals in the spot once occupied by the hippo house-o-stench, but the carousel is pretty cool. I had been planning this visit for a long time - I read that the zoo would be doing a ribbon cutting at 8:30 on a Saturday morning, and I knew that if there were ever a time to hit the zoo, it would be then. Who's going to get up and be at the zoo that early on a chilly Saturday morning? Besides me, I mean. I'm always so glad when I do stuff like this. It's great fun and worth the effort. The line was indeed short, and got even shorter as the ribbon-cutting festivities came to a close. There were people dressed up as circus animals, wearing tall stilts that they could jump around on like loons. My favorite was the monkey, but unfortunately as he was jumping around he landed in a wet spot and hit the turf pretty hard. I felt so bad for him but he was back to his regular bouncing a few minutes later. Kudos go also to the lioness, who had glued two fangs on her incisors plus had very wiry-looking whiskers actually coming out of her nostrils. Very good costume. I would maybe have set a limit at sticking things up my nose, but I guess I'm not that dedicated to my craft. We rode the ride three times in all, and didn't even go see any animals because we were just about all funned out after that. Especially because as we exited the ride the first time, we were handed two big bags of cotton candy. At least this stuff was pink.