Me and All My Boys...At the Zoo

These are my boys. At least some of them. The front two are my nephews...my son is center, and my brother is the big bald one. We had a family visit this week, which culminated in a trip to the zoo in Omaha on Friday. Unfortunately, the weather guy must have been on drugs recently, because it was supposed to be partly sunny or clear, and almost 60 degrees. What we got was very cloudy, looking like it was going to rain, very windy, and maybe 50 if we were lucky. We had fun though...in spite of the weather.

My nephews had not been to the Omaha zoo before...maybe once, but they were very young. The older will be four this summer, and the younger turned two last fall. My son has been to the zoo several times, he remembered several of his favorite places. All the boys were very excited to see the animals.

I think their favorite was the aquarium. They were impressed with the sharks, manta rays, and jelly fish. I could my brother's temper was getting short by the end of the day though. He was trying to wrangle two boys under the age of 4 for several hours in very crowded settings. No thanks. I will take my single 5 year old.

Lunchtime was fun. We wanted to eat at the tree top restaurant, the only 'indoor' cafe at the zoo. Since it was threatening rain, we opted for this choice. Unfortunately, there was a very long line. A very, very, very long line. We were excited to make it out of the hallway and into the actual cafe, only to find out that there were many zig-zags of those fence things. We were trying to keep all those little boys quiet for about 45 minutes until we got up to the food. It wasn't too terrible, price-wise. My son and I spent about 20 bucks for lunch.

We also had Christmas in March. We were supposed to go down for Christmas, but they all had the flu. We brought their Christmas presents (which I had neglected to wrap). I put them under the Christmas colored blanket, said, "Close your eyes", and they got to pull it off. Much more exciting than wrapping paper. We also made our traditional Christmas family dish, "The Tray". You might not think that sounds very exciting, but my brother and I look forward to it every year. My mother made a big traditional turkey dinner for Thanksgiving, but for Christmas we would have crackers, dip, snacks, deviled eggs, and fried oysters. It is not a Christmas for us now, without the cream cheese tray.

My son wants nothing to do with the tray. My ex husband caused quite the hullabaloo the first Christmas he spent with our family, by going down to the kitchen Christmas eve after everyone was asleep, assuming the tray was 'leftovers', and eating a third of it. My father and brother nearly killed him. Luckily, my current guy doesn't care for it, so there is much more for me!

We have plans to get together will all the kids, including the older ones, this summer. We would also like to meet up in Nebraska and go camping. We only get to meet up a few times a year, but it is important to us to have our kids feel like a family, and know each other.