The Jashley Family blog: We're going to the Zoo!

Today we took our first family vacation and we went to the Blank Park Zoo in Des Moines. The kids aren't always great passengers in the car so we have shied away from road trips in the past. It took us about 2.5 hours to get to the zoo today and that seems to be about their limit on car riding. On the way there Ryker napped for about the last hour and a half. Ilyana played with some toys and we saved our surprise toy for the last hour when she started getting antsy. We rented a kids tablet from the downtown library which had some fun pre-loaded games on it. She was definitely a huge fan! Once we got to Des Moines we grabbed some lunch and then headed to the zoo! We purposefully went in the middle of the week after school had started so it wasn't crowded. Ilyana had a ton of fun looking at all of the animals, holding her arms out wanting to hold them, and learning animal noises. I think that her favorite animal was the wallabies that were jumping around. She was also a big fan of the macaque monkeys and the flamingos. In fact, we got to see a two day old flamingo. My favorite animal was the lion, which surprisingly wasn't sleeping! Jake's favorite animal was the giraffes which were beautiful! I ended up wearing Ryker in my baby carrier which he enjoyed. In fact, he enjoyed it so much that he took a nap for the last 45 minutes that we were there. We made it through the zoo in about an hour and a half and then we headed back home! Ilyana fell asleep almost instantly when we got in the car. We must have wore her out! The Blank Park Zoo was perfect for our kids and we definitely plan to go back again next year!