An Isaac & His Grams

This past weekend my mom came to visit. It was a really fast weekend, but Isaac had so much fun playing with his Grams. Saturday we got out of the house (so Paul could prepare for his interview to get into the MIS department at UofA) and went up to Mt. Lemmon to play in the leftover snow from our last storm. Sunday we hung out at home, Isaac rode his bike, played hide and seek, had a pillow fight and all around had the most fun ever with Grams. Last night after dropping her off at the airport, Isaac was majorly bummed. Today, returning to school seemed a little bit hard, and a little bit of a letdown after his amazing weekend. But I think he's on the upswing now. This is a short week at school for us--we get Thursday and Friday off for Rodeo Break--and we have fun plans for Thursday and Friday, so the week should only get better!
On another note, less than two weeks ago it snowed in parts of Tucson and it's outlying areas, today it was 90 degrees. What a crazy "winter" it has been! But still better than some of the freezing cold, snow and ice of many other places this time of year!

Valentine's Day at the Zoo

Yesterday Isaac and I decided to go to the Zoo, turns out a lot of other people had the same idea...The Zoo had lots of special activities planned for the day. They had several activities visitors could do, including making enrichment activities for some of the residents of the Zoo (put lard and pumpkin puree inside a cardboard tube then fill it with bird seed and nuts, etc), and free face painting. Our first stop was face painting, where Isaac asked the teen volunteer to make him a white tiger.


The coolest activity by far was definitely the polar bear enrichment. Our zoo has a three part enclosure for the polar bears: outside grass, boulders, tree; rocks and water; lower level viewing of the polar bears so you can watch them swim at eye level. For this activity the staff put the bears in the back quarters, opened the windows in the lower viewing area and gave the kids gloves to let them smear frosting on the bear side of the windows.
When all the smearing of frosting was done, they closed and locked the windows and let the polar bears out. Then we all got to watch as the polar bears smelled out the frosting, dove into the water and came to lick the frosting off the windows just on the other side of the glass from all of us. It was so fun to see them so close enjoying their Valentine's Day treat!