Little Brothers/Big Sister

Sunday I took my "little" and his actual little brother to the zoo. (Big Brothers/Big Sisters refers to kids and the their volunteers as "littles" and "bigs", respectively.) I am not completely clueless when it comes to kids because I have a younger sister (by 6 years) that I loved spending time with when I was little (and still love spending time with), but I am definitely almost completely clueless because these days I rarely hang out with kids, and my tendency is to treat them with the same ratio of seriousness:humor that I use with adults. I would say they take it pretty well, but onlookers often make a funny face when they see me talking completely straight-faced to a 3 year old, with no babyfication of the words. Anyway, we had a great time at the zoo, and Robert and Anthony especially liked the exhibits where you could interact with the animals, like the aviary pictured here and the petting zoo. Little did I know, the parking lot outside my office would provide petting zoo opportunities later that night. As I have mentioned, there are a lot of herpetologists in my department, which means people are almost always going to or coming from the field to collect lizards, snakes, and frogs (ostensibly for their research, but it seems like they also just really like collecting things). The troupe that went out this past weekend came across a motherless baby lamb in the middle of nowhere and decided they had to save it from certain starvation/predation alone in the wilds of Texas. I wish Robert and Anthony had been with me then, as spontaneous-unplanned-baby-animal-ogling-in-the-parking-lot is way more fun than the petting zoo.

PS. Betsy-- you'll get your very own blogpost soon, I swear!