Monkey Business

I haven’t started playing with it yet, but I’m going to move to Wordpress. They seem a lot more laid back and a lot cooler than Google, and I’ll be able to pick up all my posts and move them as a whole.


Today was LMJ Friday, which is always a great way to start the weekend. We went to the zoo, just the two of us, for the first time. We arrived right as the siamangs were starting their morning song, which is just wild. Wild is a bit “on the nose” as a description since we’re talking about monkeys, but I can’t think of a better adjective. I opened the van door and LMJ said, “The siamangs are laughing, Daddy”, and then she started fake laughing. It was barely ten in the morning and it was already a great day. We almost didn’t go. I got everything ready and asked the baby girl if she wanted to go, and she said no. She said she wanted to go to the park. I figured alright. It’s your day, but we had to deposit a check for Mommy first. LMJ wasn’t really with that plan, but she went along because she was strapped in her car seat. We handled our business at the bank, and as I was putting the van in drive she told me that she did want to go to the zoo. Perfect, we were half way there already. All 7 billion people in the world were at the Jacksonville Zoological Gardens this morning. It was the first time that I’ve ever seen the parking lot full. That’s not counting the 9000 school buses dropping off kids. We fastpassed the lines with my membership card and spent a grand total of zero minutes waiting. The whole point of going to the zoo was to wear the baby girl out so she would take an early nap. We got through the turnstiles and she went full speed non-stop for an hour. We went through Africa and South America and were about to head to the Great Apes, when she said, “Pick me up, Daddy”. We had just finished looking at the jaguar exhibit, which is physically as far from the main gate as possible. I saw this coming, but damn is that little girl heavy. I carried her all the way up to the front of the zoo when she asked me to put her down so we could go through the gift shop. She is such a girl. If it was up to her she would have been asleep before we cleared the property, but thanks to my timely distribution of fruit and drinks, she stayed awake until we got home. I broke a few traffic laws and pedestrian bones on the way, but there was no way in hell I was dealing with a short-napped baby two weeks in a row.