Day 30

Adventures Down Under this week. Only a four day week because of the 4th yesterday. Had two faces that I was familiar with this morning - Oliver, who we had the first two weeks, and Reed, who was here last week. Then there were 22 new campers. They're a pretty decent group. Should be a good week.

Today, we learned some general information about Australia, fed the goats, and visited the big cats this morning. The animal presenter brought an Eastern box turtle and the fox snake. I always wondered why it was called a fox snake, but guess I never took the time to ask or figure out why. Well, it is because the snake smells like a fox... sort of a defense mechanism.

While half of the group worked on decorating their bags for the week, the other half worked on their activity books for the day. One of the sentence starters for the day said, "If I could go anywhere in the world, I would go to__________". As I was helping Oliver, he said the Amazon. So, I started spelling it for him and mentioned that I had visited the Amazon. He replied, "Yep, I remember. That's why I want to go there." :-)

We read the book "From Head to Toe", which gets you up and moving, and then we did the animal hokey pokey before heading to lunch. After lunch was train ride time. When we got down there, one load was just leaving so we were waiting in line, and then Taylor tripped and scraped her knee. So, I took her back to the Discovery Center quick to fix her up, and we made it back to the train station just as the train was pulling in.

Here's our bandaged up Taylor:

This afternoon, we had 9 campers with us. I'm excited to be back up in numbers for some of the afternoon activities. At one point, we headed back toward the big cats, which turned out to be a pretty good idea. The animals were pretty active over that way today. First, I had never heard the gibbons "whooop" so much. It was pretty cool. Also, the kids usually catch on pretty quickly that gibbons are apes not monkeys. Well, at one point Chance was said "awesome monkeys", and I reminded him that they aren't monkeys but apes. Then, I heard a lady close by say to who she was with, "Did you hear that? She said they're apes not monkeys." :-)

Then, when we got to the tiger exhibit, the female was swimming in her pool. She played around a bit and then got up and moved around a bunch before laying back down. We hung out there for a while watching her. I've never seen either of the tigers this active before.

We finished up the day by spending a little time at the playground. Reed and I made a stop at the hippopotamus water fountain at one point, and Reed enjoyed that. He was waiting for him to talk, and I said you need to stick your head in there, first. haha