On The Road Again

While I sit here running my printer out of ink to print off our pictures from today's field trip to a local zoo, I thought I would jump over and say hi. I apologize if most of it will be incoherent, but a lack of sleep and a lot of time spent outside the home will do it to me.

We have been going so much more than normal this week. Sooo much more than I really like. I am such a homebody. Today was a field trip to a local (45 minutes away) zoo. Of course we ended up running late, even though I started loading children in the car 15 minutes before my desired leave time and 20 minutes before the need to leave time.

This can be directly blamed on the fact that some people have no sense. The term people is used loosely, as I will be berating a group of teenagers for the next few minutes. While hustling the cargo load of supplies and necessities that is required to transport 3 young children to a 4 hour field trip and picnic lunch, a group of class-skipping, smoking, 'OC'-looking teenagers decided that my house would be a great one to scoot through the backyard in order to sneak back on campus. No matter that the gate (yes, we have a fence around said backyard) is double-locked with bungy cords and the back gate is so over grown that one can barely tell there is a gate at all. Of course I am a bit oblivious to this as I have just hustled the children out the door to the car, while I scamper around the house to figure out what I will actually forget this time. I go to let the puppy out for the day, and when I do I see teenagers walking away from our backyard area and the back gate (the one close to a busy road, and hasn't been opened in 3 years) wide opened. As I run out to close it before the puppy figures it out, I do not see the front gate (two bungy cords wrapped around to lock it) wide open. The puppy does, though, and out she goes. I close the gate in the back and head out to catch the puppy. I am not too worried, as right now the only place she runs away to is her mother's which is across the neighborhood street from us.

I am fuming at this point, partly because I realize that this explains why our older dog was on the front porch when I came home from the dealership yesterday morning and the side gate was adjar. Two days in a row - and don't even have the decency to close the gates after they blatently trespass. I located the school's phone number, which is being added to our frig phone list and let them know about it. The school is pretty good about the relationship with our neighborhood. And I understand that my description of them doesn't help much - they look like the kids on OC, which could be about 1000 of their enrollment. I did tell the school that tomorrow I call the police.

What gets me is that they KNEW I was at home. My car was in the driveway, my kids were in the car and I had just been outside, where I had seen them up the street and they had seen me walking back into the house.

Anyway, this made us late starting out. Then in my continued fuming I missed the turn I wanted to take, decided to take another road. That road was having construction work - so we sat, and sat. We had to be there by 10:30 - I got there at 10:28.

The zoo was good. Very different than the state zoo. And odd assortment, but very rare and neat animals. Have you ever heard of a barking deer. They had a bunch of them. The animals were also close up and you could really see them. They even had a petting/feeding section. It was a very kid-friendly, hands-on type of place. We had an excellent program presented to the group that lasted about an hour. There was a lot of interaction between the zoo employees, the animals and the children. An area for a picnic lunch while we watched zebras play, and a really big field where the kids could run, and run. I will go back, and even pay full-price for it!

Tomorrow we will be out and about again for most of the day. I really am looking forward to Friday. We have Magic School Bus in the am, then straight to gymnastics. Hopefully we can come home and get our first organized bit of educating done since Monday. Learning has been very high this week - just kinda quirky. A lot of imaginary play involving Egypt, with multiple crafts to go along with it. Zoo animals and such for science and back to our enjoyment of the Narnia series with our CD player working in the car again.

The printer is/has been done and my eyelids are drooping.

Peace,

Amy