Fort Worth zoo

I was writing this post anyway for our field trip report but it definitely works for this week's writing prompt from The Homeschool Classroom - our best homeschooling moment recently. These field trips have been our ONLY homeschool moments lately. We've been sick for 2 weeks straight now from the tree pollen. Anyway ...

We decided to take a spring break trip last week to Texas and started with the Fort Worth Zoo. We were there from darn near open to close without even realizing it - lots to see!

My Proud Mom moment was when we were looking at a coral reef aquarium, and Sunny identified the brain coral with no prompting. I'd been about to point it out to her, but she beat me. "Look, Mom! Brain coral!" We had learned about types of coral in the IMax movie at the New Orleans aquarium.

Sunny says: The brain coral was all different colors.

Favorites: The penguins, the kangaroos, the big cats, the elephants, and of course the ride on the carousel. No trip to the zoo is complete with riding the carousel even though it had "only" horses.

Not so much: The hippo exhibit has no viewing area at all. We had to look over a bank of shrubbery to see, kind of, the top of the pool and the hippos were swimming underwater because it was pretty hot. We saw their backs and one of their noses, and that's it. Sad, because we like hippos. (Well, my kids do anyway. I'm still wondering what the appeal is - they're rather ugly.)

Weirdness: When we went into a cafe to get ice cream to cool off, there was a large window with an alligator right on the other side of it. At one point, the mouth very slowly opened and the alligator lay there with its jaw up. We got a great view of what the inside of its mouth looks like. A number of people - us included - stood there discussing whether or not the gator was real because we honestly couldn't tell. Would a real gator lay there with its mouth open like that for no apparent reason? A couple of people swore they saw the eyelids twitch. I just figured that it's a zoo - why would they have a fake animal (aside from the bronze statues here and there that are obviously fake) in a ZOO?

We learned: An alligator's brain is the size of a golf ball. A baboon's butt can be a shade of really bright fuschia pink. Don't wear jeans in Texas in March - the forecast was for about 80 and it got up to 90 degrees.

Birdie loved the penguins.

Sunny and Posy listened to the sounds of the big cats,

and then got a pretty close-up look at a jaguar. 

I don't know that I'd ever seen a white tiger before. Very pretty!