Celebrating Jaggar's Birthday

As I said, I didn't do a big party for Jaggar's birthday this year, but I just wanted to treat him to a day of something he would love.  Ever since we went to the zoo in Louisville last year in October, he has talked nonstop about it.  So, I decided to try the Birmingham zoo for Jaggar's birthday.  I'd only been to the Birmingham zoo one time, and that was over ten years ago when I first moved here as a chaperone for Copeland's field trip.  It left a lot to be desired.  I thought it was a terrible zoo, and it was.  Interestingly enough, the director of the Louisville zoo moved there shortly after that to build it up.  So, I knew it couldn't have gotten WORSE, and thankfully, it was a lot better.  We invited Jaggar's bff, Paisley, to go with us, and I kept Sage out of school that day.  Here was the day that I gave Jaggar a gift so he'd know that we were doing birthday things that day.  Travis had to work a bit that morning but met us at the zoo later that morning with Craig.  So I made the mistake of waking Jaggar up to give him his present before Travis left.  Terrible idea.

Because all of my pics look like this.

 I guess that's an attempted smile while still half asleep.

 And you can see the great reaction we got.  Only later did he care about this.  He loves the movie, Despicable Me (great movie, btw), and the sequel is coming out this summer, so they have TOYS now.  I knew this had to be for Jaggar.

 So, mid morning we met Nichole and the girls, who followed us to the zoo.  I wanted a pic as soon as we got in, and Paisley was camera shy in the beginning.  Both of my kids can't stand the sun, so you see what we got.

 The first part of the zoo was a lot of birds, which I thought was pretty boring.  Owls, okay.  Toucans...sure, those are cool.  But when I'm looking at something in a cage that looks like something sitting on my power line?  Yawn.  We moved through those pretty quickly, but the seals here were fun.

 Bamboo forest. 

 Bleu Jack loves his feet.

 How creepy is that?  The bars keeping us apart from that thing weren't high at ALL, and I was fine to move past that thing quickly.

 Finally, Paisley was ready for a picture.  There were a million of these cut outs all over the zoo, and I think we made pictures at every single one.  That's okay though.  That's why we were there.

 The orangutan, which was high up in a tree, holding a baby orangutan as tight as she could.  It was the cutest thing ever, but she was too high up and it was too dark to get a picture.

 Comparing how big they are to an orangutan.  I have a lot of pictures from this day so, this will be several posts.