5/26/08

Perfect Reeking Elephants?

Today was one of those perfect days - the kind that you look back on and say, "Remember when..." What made it perfect was just being together as a family and taking the time to do stuff that was out of the ordinary.

These family days for us are few and far between. Paul only gets a handful of days off from work and when they come, they are allotted for youth group activities. Now that I'm working on Saturdays, we've lost that day as well. By the time I get home from work, the kids are going down for naps. When they wake up, it's dinner time and another hour of play or two before the bedtime routine hits.

But today, we both had the day off. And we lived it up. It seemed like we were on vacation. The kids actually slept in (till almost 10:30!) We grabbed Dunkin D's croissant sandwiches, a coffee, and a pink sprinkly donut for Selah, and headed off to the zoo.

I can't tell you how much I love the zoo. I love the crazy walking, the polar bears, the sea lions, giraffes, elephants, monkeys, penguins, you name it. I love that God is insanely creative. I love that hippos can eat up to 100 lbs of grass a night, that no two zebras have the same pattern of stripes, and that there are 35 different kinds of seals alone. And I love meercats, for no apparent reason. They just make me laugh.

Today I loved the zoo through my kids. I loved watching them see kangaroos, deer, komodo dragons, tigers, owls, and camels for the first time. They were in absolute awe, mouths wide open. And Selah was skipping and jumping and squealing. As adults, we grow so used to the beauty and creativity around us. We forget to take the time to soak it all in. Today Paul and I stopped to absorb just a snippet of God's wonder and it was breathtaking. It's really funny to me that large smelly zoo animals could spring tears to my eyes. But they crept climbing back into these eyes of mine. Funny how that is...

We ended our afternoon with a sit-down lunch, a trip to a play area, and vanilla swirl ice cream (and for me, a coffee with extra cream and extra sugar.) I'm really not sure that today could have been any better. Thank you, Paul, for loving us with your time and for treating us with a vacation day like this one. It was perfectly perfect. And I will remember when...




No comments:

 

Our Simple Expressions | Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial License | Dandy Dandilion Designed by Simply Fabulous Blogger Templates