Reston Zoo

Last Saturday Ryan and I took all 3 boys to the Reston Zoo.  It was the first time any of us had ever been there, even though we've lived within a couple miles of the place for the past 5 years!  I was surprised by how many more animals it had than the view from the road provides.  I was also surprised by how "dangerous" the free wagon ride could potentially be...I guess it's more of an "at your own risk" type thing, but they don't warn you.  Basically you crowd onto this open air wagon and a tractor pulls you around a big loop making several stops where animals swarm the wagon expecting to be fed by the people and their buckets of animal feed.  I think we were the only ones who didn't have our feed bucket with us on the wagon (it was left behind in the stroller), but that was more than ok since we had our hands full with the boys, and there was nothing stopping these ravenous animals from coming face to face with us anyway!

The speed with which the large animals ran over to the wagon at the first stop startled most of the little kids...causing some of them to scream, which in turn made Oliver nervous and he started crying a little bit.  Luckily, I had some puffs in my bag and that calmed him down!  But seriously, I was busy focusing most of my attention and energy on keeping Spencer from getting poked by those huge antlers!

After the wagon ride, we walked around and used our feed bucket on some of the other animals.  The boys weren't really interested in the llamas, even though they were leaning over and eating right in Owen's face!  After a couple minutes, Oliver decided he wanted to pet the llama.  It was cute, but he was getting his fingers a little too close to the llama's hungry mouth...so we moved him away!

A few other animals we saw...Owen especially liked the pigs, since he's been practicing his piggy face and noises lately.  And he also pointed and got excited when he saw the little lamb being fed a bottle - I think he wanted some of that bottle too!