Weekend in review

SIDE NOTE - Previous to the weekend I did complete The Help. In fact, I stayed up until almost 3 am reading it. Needless to say, it has taken a spot on my top ten list. It is seriously one of the best books I have read in quite a while. A must read!

The actual weekend started off pretty lame. Seth got home late on Friday and about thirty minutes after he got there the power went out. There had been a short lived storm and apparently lightning hit a branch on a tree at the end of our street. The branch fell onto a power line and was slightly on fire. A fire truck came, the power went out, and the firemen proceeded to wait for Georgia Power to arrive. We had this fantastic dinner planned to be made and ended up eating turkey sandwiches instead and doing a whole lot of nothing. The power was out until after 10 pm. I mean, what can you do when you have no power and you can't leave because the baby is asleep?  Well, since I had stayed up so late reading the night before I just went to bed. Man how Friday nights have changed.

This is the first weekend in a very long time that Seth and I have both been home for an entire weekend and Seth hasn't had to work (mostly). We decide to take full advantage and take Lila to the zoo. In the car on the way there we start discussing how this could be a horrible idea. It's August for God's sake. And, she's only 14 months old. My prediction was that if she even notices the animals she will refer to all of them as dogs. She ended up noticing one orangutan and she immediately said "dogga!".

I can't remember the last time I have been to a zoo. As we were walking around I started to have very mixed feelings about it. Something makes me uneasy about caged animals and the desire to ooh and ahh over them. I can appreciate the research and development that goes into running a zoo and I can see the benefits. However, it just comes off as depressing at times. That being said, I wanted to make the best of this family day we were having so I just tried to get over it.

Overall I am glad we went. We have the sweatiest kid ever as you can sort of see from the pictures. I would strongly suggest not going to the zoo in the dead of summer for a few reasons. First, the animals are doing everything they can to find the shade and just lay in it and do nothing. This means you don't get to see much. Second, the rest of Atlanta is also looking for fun summer things to do. If you struggle with people who don't discipline their children, people who don't watch where they're going, or people who have zero manners, the zoo on a Saturday in August is not for you.

Despite all of this the entire day became amazingly worthwhile at the "petting" zoo which contained goats and sheep. The problem with this petting zoo is a culmination of all of the things mentioned above. I mean, there was one kid basically pouncing on a goat that was laying miserably on the ground while the mom took pictures of her poorly behaved child. It was infuriating. The amazing part for us though was the sheep. Lila has a love of a few animals and sheep would be one of them. This may sound odd, but they are in one of her favorite books and her absolute favorite Baby Einstein movie. She sees them and says "baa, baa, baa" and it's the cutest thing. She seemed to truly love meeting a real, live sheep. She wasn't as sure about the goats, but she seemed to enjoy running around with them.

As a great end to our weekend we went to the Braves game today with Katie and Brandon (sans babies). We were lucky enough to have seats in the shade. Aside from a really mature kid playing the penis game a few seats over it was quite a lovely day! Don't worry...Brandon totally put him in his place. 

I hope you had a great weekend as well! Our next adventure will be the Atlanta Botanical Garden this coming weekend. There is a water pad in the children's garden that we can take full advantage of with our sweaty little one :-)