Zoo Lights!

After Thanksgiving Day, we decided to go to Zoo Lights on the following Friday.  Here in Portland, the local zoo puts up miles and miles of light strings.  We decided to arrive early-ish while there was still daylight so that we could see some animals while we were there.  (Last time we went, two years ago, we arrived at night and when going home after seeing the lights, Eliana asked, "When are we going to see the animals?")

We ended up going with Emily's brother and the girls' cousins.  Gabriel is not too fond of being held by anyone except for Mommy or Daddy right now, and only tolerated Uncle Charles for a few seconds.

The zoo has a train that normally takes you through the zoo to see the lights.  This year it was out of commission because they were re-routing some tracks.  So the area around the train was open and we got to see it up close.

To give you a sense of how many lights are put up, here is a mural that cover the wall of an entire three-story building.

We swung by the elephant exhibit and saw momma elephant taking care of the baby elephant.

Karina loooooves watching the elephants and will stand there for hours if we let her.  Gabriel was intrigued too and was mesmerized by these big animals.  He was reaching out to the elephants, wanting to pet them, I guess.

We brought our double stroller thinking that Karina and Gabriel would ride in it.  Instead, it was Karina and Eliana getting a ride from Uncle Charles.

The zoo had this cool walkway/corridor/tunnel full of colored lights.  It was pretty impressive.

Gabriel was really interested in these glowing things that we call light bulbs.  He's never touched one before, or seen one up close.

There was a small gift shop and the girls were naturally attracted to the useless junky toys there.  They both liked the flamingo pincher things, where you squeeze one end and the beak on the other end of the stick opens and closes.  But no way we were going to buy those things for $4.99.

Gabriel continued his fascination in the light bulbs.  He kept pulling at them.  Which made us wonder how he was going to react to a Christmas tree in the house when we got around to setting one up…was he going to pull on the lights so hard that he would pull the tree over?

Afterwards, we moseyed on to Uncle Charles' house for a yummy dinner of take-out Thai food.  Karina enjoyed the pad thai and Eliana the stir-fried beef.  Then the kids put on jammies and we snapped a picture before heading home…