Tuesday – Labor Day
Sep. 8th, 2009 01:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ninanevermore.
.
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I realized yesterday that while seeing your child's lips turn blue is generally supposed to be a scary thing, it's not so bad when the culprit is the blue dye in an ice cream bar shaped like Batman's head. My son wanted to eat Sponge Bob Squarepants, but the guy manning the ice cream cart in front of the Houston Zoo was all out of Sponge Bobs, so Sweet Pea settled on eating Batman, instead. We had stayed until closing and I was facing the prospect of remembering where I'd parked my car when we passed the ice cream cart, operated by a man who looked and talked like a carney, except that he had better teeth.
"I'm hungry," Sweet Pea said as we walked toward the parking lot.
He had just eaten a big slice of pizza inside the zoo half an hour before, but he'd also had a very busy day. "We'll stop and find something to eat after we get in the car," I told him.
"Look," he said, pointing toward the ice cream cart, "There's ice cream. Ice cream is something you can eat." His tone was so logical and his face was so earnest that I melted like a Popsicle in the hot Houston sun. Besides, I figured waiting for him to finish eating the ice cream would give the parking lot time to empty out and increase my chances of finding my car.
Jeff worked on Labor Day. Airports are open 24/7, and that means that the people who work in them work no matter what, unless it is their scheduled days off (this means he will also be working on Christmas day this year). Since doing something for Labor Day as a family was out of the question, I decided that I wanted to do something fun come hell or high water. I suggested the zoo to my 4 and 11/12ths year old, who readily agreed that the zoo sounded like a great way to spend the day.
The Houston Zoo is located in Houston's Herman Park, close to the Texas Medical Center and a good 45 miles from where I live. Jeff and I took him there a couple years ago, but he doesn't remember it. Of course, being a holiday, the park and the parking lots were jam packed. It took over half an hour after I got there to find a place to park my car, what with bus and rail service not being available from where I live in the boondocks. The first thing we came upon was the station for the miniature train that circles Herman Park. My son wanted to ride it, so that was the first order of business.
The park has offered rides on a miniature train for more than 50 years, and I remember riding on it when I was a child. My parents fit in the train back then, but I remember they looked kind of cramped. In 2008 they finished revamping the train and updating it with a larger model that not only gives adults more leg room, it can accommodate wheelchairs, as well (the wheelchair car was the one right behind the engineer, with the first row of seats behind it reserved for those accompanying the person in the chair). I hadn't ridden on the new train and hadn't been on the old one in the last 30 years. Because of the train ride, I almost didn’t get to see the zoo.
"Mom! A playground!" my son exclaimed. Indeed, there is a very large and very nice playground in the park, and it was crawling with laughing, screaming children. "Let's go there!"
"I thought you wanted to go to the zoo?"
"But now I want to go to that playground!"
An intelligent adult would have said to herself, "Hey! I can save myself $16 bucks, not to mention the cost of overpriced concessions, by taking him to the playground and letting him play until he passes out from exhaustion. He hasn't been to this park before, or played with these children, and what really matters here is that the day be fun and enjoyable for my little one." A less intelligent adult, on the other hand, would say, "Are you crazy, kid? We have playgrounds in the parks close to where we live! I drove almost 50 miles to get here, and as God is my witness I want to see a #$%^ing elephant!!!"
For the record, I'm not very bright.
There was some pouting and whining, but I dragged my reluctant child into the zoo to look at "stupid" animals he said he didn't care about or want to see. Once he got over the idea of not going to the playground he enjoyed the zoo, which has a children's section that has attractions that are geared toward people who are small and who like to climb on, over, and through things. With so much to do, who cares that this area smells like llama poop?
The only down side to the day was the elephant exhibit is closed for renovation while bulldozers and other pieces of heavy equipment work to recreate a facsimile of the African Serengeti here in the swampy coastal plains of Southeast Texas. This leaves me no choice: I'll have to come back some other time and see them, then.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * # * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
.
.
I realized yesterday that while seeing your child's lips turn blue is generally supposed to be a scary thing, it's not so bad when the culprit is the blue dye in an ice cream bar shaped like Batman's head. My son wanted to eat Sponge Bob Squarepants, but the guy manning the ice cream cart in front of the Houston Zoo was all out of Sponge Bobs, so Sweet Pea settled on eating Batman, instead. We had stayed until closing and I was facing the prospect of remembering where I'd parked my car when we passed the ice cream cart, operated by a man who looked and talked like a carney, except that he had better teeth.
"I'm hungry," Sweet Pea said as we walked toward the parking lot.
He had just eaten a big slice of pizza inside the zoo half an hour before, but he'd also had a very busy day. "We'll stop and find something to eat after we get in the car," I told him.
"Look," he said, pointing toward the ice cream cart, "There's ice cream. Ice cream is something you can eat." His tone was so logical and his face was so earnest that I melted like a Popsicle in the hot Houston sun. Besides, I figured waiting for him to finish eating the ice cream would give the parking lot time to empty out and increase my chances of finding my car.
Jeff worked on Labor Day. Airports are open 24/7, and that means that the people who work in them work no matter what, unless it is their scheduled days off (this means he will also be working on Christmas day this year). Since doing something for Labor Day as a family was out of the question, I decided that I wanted to do something fun come hell or high water. I suggested the zoo to my 4 and 11/12ths year old, who readily agreed that the zoo sounded like a great way to spend the day.
The Houston Zoo is located in Houston's Herman Park, close to the Texas Medical Center and a good 45 miles from where I live. Jeff and I took him there a couple years ago, but he doesn't remember it. Of course, being a holiday, the park and the parking lots were jam packed. It took over half an hour after I got there to find a place to park my car, what with bus and rail service not being available from where I live in the boondocks. The first thing we came upon was the station for the miniature train that circles Herman Park. My son wanted to ride it, so that was the first order of business.
The park has offered rides on a miniature train for more than 50 years, and I remember riding on it when I was a child. My parents fit in the train back then, but I remember they looked kind of cramped. In 2008 they finished revamping the train and updating it with a larger model that not only gives adults more leg room, it can accommodate wheelchairs, as well (the wheelchair car was the one right behind the engineer, with the first row of seats behind it reserved for those accompanying the person in the chair). I hadn't ridden on the new train and hadn't been on the old one in the last 30 years. Because of the train ride, I almost didn’t get to see the zoo.
"Mom! A playground!" my son exclaimed. Indeed, there is a very large and very nice playground in the park, and it was crawling with laughing, screaming children. "Let's go there!"
"I thought you wanted to go to the zoo?"
"But now I want to go to that playground!"
An intelligent adult would have said to herself, "Hey! I can save myself $16 bucks, not to mention the cost of overpriced concessions, by taking him to the playground and letting him play until he passes out from exhaustion. He hasn't been to this park before, or played with these children, and what really matters here is that the day be fun and enjoyable for my little one." A less intelligent adult, on the other hand, would say, "Are you crazy, kid? We have playgrounds in the parks close to where we live! I drove almost 50 miles to get here, and as God is my witness I want to see a #$%^ing elephant!!!"
For the record, I'm not very bright.
There was some pouting and whining, but I dragged my reluctant child into the zoo to look at "stupid" animals he said he didn't care about or want to see. Once he got over the idea of not going to the playground he enjoyed the zoo, which has a children's section that has attractions that are geared toward people who are small and who like to climb on, over, and through things. With so much to do, who cares that this area smells like llama poop?
The only down side to the day was the elephant exhibit is closed for renovation while bulldozers and other pieces of heavy equipment work to recreate a facsimile of the African Serengeti here in the swampy coastal plains of Southeast Texas. This leaves me no choice: I'll have to come back some other time and see them, then.
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