A Zooish kind of day

Wasn't it a beautiful day in Auckland yesterday? Pure blue skies and just the right amount of winter warmth in the sunlight. Miss M had a party to go to and Richard needed to do some work so E and I hung at out home. We spent the morning building a zoo for her toy animals on the deck.

Who needs fences when you have chalk and imagination?

The hippo enclosure. Check out those teeth!

The aquarium got a little crowded, especially when the penquins joined in

Grandma doll took ticket office duty. She needed a bit of a hand from E with
 the stamping of the tickets (and then the ticket office got a good stamping too).

The baby zebra learned to climb trees. Very talented.

It was so lovely to have some one on one time with E. She started school 2 weeks ago and it already seems like she has grown up so much. She ran all the way to her classroom this morning and got stuck in practicing writing her letters as soon as we arrived. It's so wonderful to see her passion for learning. Long may it last! I have some one on one time with M today. She's home sick with a virus that seems to have most of her school in its grips. Poor love is sneezing and coughing away on the couch. Fingers crossed she's better soon. Hope you had a lovely weekend. What did you do?

Blissed Out Kittys

It was the last day of school holidays for us today. Maddy's school had a teacher only day today and Eloise's kindy doesn't go back until tomorrow so we took advantage of it and went to Auckland Zoo.

The animals seemed to be totally worn out after the school holiday traffic, but they were all out working on their tans, so I was able to get some great photos. The ones of the blissed-out big cats are my favourite.

Here's another much smaller, blissed out kitty. This is our cat Kipper helping Maddy with her drawing yesterday. He follows the kids everywhere.

We really are so lucky having Auckland Zoo on our doorstep. It has a fantastic array of animals and they are all so well cared for.

This is one of the tiger cubs that were born last year.

This emu was having a major bad hair day! I know how he feels sometimes!

This is one of the Asian otter brothers.

Four years ago, a female otter called Jin escaped from the zoo by digging under two walls and scaling a 1.6m fence. She swam down rivers and waterways to get to the harbour. She was spotted, a week after she escaped, in Devonport near where I live. Given it takes me half an hour to drive to the zoo that's a long way for a little otter to travel! She was eventually caught after a month of being on the loose and now lives in Wellington Zoo in an otter escape proof enclosure!

Eloise, my little rainbow girl (she loves to paint with every colour

under the sun), fell in love with this bird.

I was amazed that this photo turned out. The kiwi enclosure is pitch black as they are nocturnal.

And finally a Tuatara.

The girls had such a great time (and so did I).