Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia, SC has a lot of animal statues out now that they didn't have when I was a kid. They have lions, a tiger, an elephant, a tiny brontosaurus, and a very large orangutan (yes, I know the orangutan is an ape, not a monkey.) My kids love to climb on them, even when they're scorching hot from having the sun shine on them all day. I probably would've liked to climb on them myself when I was younger.
The zoo has changed a lot from when I was a kid. It seemed like back then it was more for education and all about the animals. These days, it has more of an amusement-park air to it. There's a playground, a carousel, a rock-climbing wall, train and pony rides, and other things that seem to be completely aimed at leeching the money out of parents during their visit. Most of the really cool things I remember are gone: the old birdhouse with the 15-minute rain storms (it had a penguin exhibit that didn't reek of fish; the new penguin house stinks worse than a fish market.) The sea lion exhibit, which had 16 or 17 of them and feeding/training times, has been demolished and filled in to make way for a "walk with the wallabies" exhibit. (The funniest thing about it is they compare how much kangaroo and deer are alike, and after watching Andrew Zimmern eat wallaby, it's all I could think about while I was watching the giant rats hop around.) They used to have a pair of polar bears that you could walk downstairs to watch swim in their below-ground tank - the polar bears have been replaced with grizzlies, and the door to watch them swim is blocked off. They also had two tribes of howler monkeys that my brothers and I could get started screaming at each other, who you could hear from any part of the zoo once they got started. I'm sure they make a lot more money with the new festival-atmosphere, but the glamour I used to view the zoo through as a kid certainly isn't there for me anymore - I always wanted to go and watch the animals, now my kids just want to go to the gift shop and ride the carousel.
After the zoo, we went and ate at the Happy China Buffet. All three of us love that restaurant, they have a huge selection that includes bong-bong chicken (one of my kid's favorites) and kim-chi (one of my favorites.) It's always nice to eat a meal that someone else made at a table I don't have to clean, even if I do have to pay more for it. The kids were really good there this time, too - Riene fixed her own plate, and Bear wasn't doing his normal bit where he runs up to other people's tables and asks them if he can try their food (I can't help but laugh when he asks people to try their steaks or for some of their shrimp in the fancier places we go to.)
When we got home, the kids dove right into the pool. They picked out new tubes a few days ago, and they were playing a game where they'd pull the head off of one of Bear's spiderman toys, then dive through their tubes to pick it up off the bottom. Amazingly, they've never lost a head playing that game - but they did manage to lose one of the bodies. The disembodied head now resides on my desk, in case the body decides to show back up.
I got them both to clean up their rooms today. I've learned that if I just say "go clean your room" and don't actually stand there and tell them what to do, they end up trashing the rooms even more. It wouldn't take me more than 10 minutes to do their rooms myself, but they've got to learn to do it right themselves, or they'll end up as complete slobs when they're adults. You can tell when you go to someone else's house if their parents actually stood over them and made them clean right when they were kids. (Tip: Want to know how well someone actually keeps their house clean? Look in the microwave, then in the fridge. If either one is dirty and the rest of the house looks fine, that means they only cleaned up because they were expecting guests.)
Time to finish dinner. The kids are eating nachos (again, it's the last of the bag of chips,) hotdogs, and beans. I'm going to have a chicken quarter and a can of diced tomatoes and chilis, and rutabaga. Yum!
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