Hoorah!

It's time for Back to School.  And although the kids and I have had our ups and downs this summer, I decided to give them an End Of Summer Hoorah!  I know.  I'm cute.  I do what I can.  So the kids and I headed down to the city have a sleep over with my brother and his darling family.  When we got to their place we had some dinner, took a walk to the park, found an old golf ball on our way, went back to their house, sawed open the golf ball to discover the weirdest innards I've ever seen, and then started setting up for our "sleep out" on the deck.  That's right!  Cokin (my SIL)  insisted that we sleep outside and obviously my kids were down with that.  So as we lay there in our sleeping bags looking at the stars and listening to sirens in the distance, Lil' G read to us from her joke book and we all laughed until we finally fell asleep.  Amazingly the kids slept through the night.  It was a good night.

The following morning Cokin and I packed up the kiddos and headed for the zoo.  We saw every animal from the baby elephant to the snakes and even made it in time for the bird show.  (Did I mention that Aunt Cokin participated in the bird show?  Good times!)  And although this was not my first trip to the zoo, my kids and Cokin taught me some new things.  First of all I learned that if you howl at the monkeys they will howl back.  Between Cokin and Ranger, there was some serious conversation going on.  Second of all Ranger explained to us how he was certain that one giraffe was a boy and one was a girl.  Afterall, one had a "wilford".  And last but not least we learned that the gorilla has extremely poor hygiene.  Cokin pointed out that he needs help wiping or he's gonna get a rash.  True dat, sista.  And don't think that we went out looking for these inappropriate life lessons.  The gorilla literally stuck his rear end up against the glass.  Not our fault!  Isn't it the responsibility of a good parent to turn everyday experiences into teaching opportunities?  Just sayin'.

So back to school, back to school!  Hope everyone had an end of summer hoorah that was as rad and educational as ours.  If not, get on it!  There's still time.