Free Zoo Day!!

We headed to the zoo on Sunday for a perfect fall afternoon.  The weather was mid 60's and gorgeous!  And of course it was great that what would have cost us $40 was absolutely free thanks to Kroger and the Humane Society.  We had never been to the Knoxville zoo and we enjoyed it enough.  We could have done without the literally, 13,000 other Knoxvillians, but it was still worth our money, time.

Oliver spent most of his time snuggled up to one or the other of us in the Moby wrap.  We did our usual hold and moved him over to our hip and it was a very comfortable hold.  We have gotten used to our Ergo and mostly use that these days but the Moby worked great.  At first I was really regretting our decision due to the massive amounts of people but as we kept going throughout the zoo it got a little better.  We really enjoyed the African section which was where we got to see elephants!  Oliver did a lot of staring at the ground but occasionally would look at the animals.  Kurt was narrating what Oliver was thinking and said, "Yea, I know we have one of those at home."  I wonder if that's what he was thinking?

Towards the end we came upon the gorilla then the chimpanzees.  We saw something rather interesting and kind of sad.  The baby chimp was eating an apple and sitting on the rocks near the glass.  There were lots of people pushed up to the glass to watch him.  He starting coming towards us little by little then got up and threw a stick at the glass; then went back to eating his apple.  The mama chimp sees this and comes out from hiding behind the stone wall and gets her babe.  He doesn't want to go but he does listen and mama chimp walks behind him as if patting his bottom to keep him going.  When he's far enough away from the scads of people she lets him go back to playing and she goes back to hide behind the stone wall.  It kind of broke my heart.  It was like the mama chimp was protecting her baby and made me feel like they were unhappy being locked up and stared at every day.  Here's the baby.