This isn’t going to be the usual Weekend Top Five post, because there’s really only one day over the weekend that we actually did anything worth writing about. The rest of the weekend was made up of bike riding, girls fighting, and my sneaking in as much reading time as I could get – I’d wanted to re-read the last two Harry Potter books since seeing the movie a couple of weeks ago. 

August has always been kind of a bittersweet month for me. It’s usually the hottest month of the summer here, but every day seems like a reminder of exactly how little of summertime is actually left – leaving me to try and cram every activity we haven’t done yet into these last few weeks. In past years, the first weekend of August has included a day trip to visit my aunt and uncle’s house, along with my mom and brother. This year we won’t be going – my uncle passed away last month, and my mom’s issues this year have made the trip impossible as well. I don’t know if we’ll make it to the beach – kind of an odd thought considering how close we live to Lake Michigan, but the weather has been so cool that the water hasn’t really warmed up very much this year anyway. So we’ll see.

One thing that we’ve wanted to do all summer but couldn’t until August was to visit our little local zoo. It’s a pretty nice one – and our Children’s Museum membership allows us to go there for free all during this month so I’m hoping to get in a few trips there before August ends. We made our first trek on Sunday since Ron had the day off and could go with us.

We got there later than planned in the afternoon, but still managed to see just about everything that we wanted to without feeling like we were rushed at all.

After a quick trip through the small aquarium building, we started off ‘Down Under’ and found out that while Hannah is just about the height of a Wallaby, none of the girls even come close to being as tall as a Kangaroo.

Here’s a an actual Wallaby for comparison – although none of them were standing up, so it wasn’t quite possible to see how tall they really are in person.

The animals that Hannah wanted to see the most were the lemurs – she’s become quite a fan of the show ‘Zoboomafoo’ and was very excited to have the chance to see ‘real, live’ lemurs at the zoo. These were ring-tailed lemurs…

(I haven’t exactly figured out how to take the best photos through the wires of the cages yet – sorry)

One thing I noticed about photo-taking at the zoo is that almost all of my pictures of the girls are from the back (since they were looking at the animals). I’m rather fond of photos taken from behind anyway – and here are a few of my favorites from this zoo trip:

Almost every animal we saw was awake, although some were clearly resting – which actually made for better photo-taking opportunities since they were sitting still. One of these days I’ll learn enough about my camera to figure out the best settings to get clear, crisp photos, but for now I’m pretty happy with these. 

I think that these ‘animals’ were my favorites of all, however.  But maybe I’m just a bit biased.