Feed me! Feed me!

As we were fighting our way through the sea of zoo-goers on Monday, Dracen asked where the animals were that he could  touch. "I want to actually pet the animals. Let's go to Lazy 5 this week. Can we? Can we, Mom?" 

And so that's how we ended up at the Lazy 5 Ranch on Wednesday morning. It's about a 45 minute drive for us and though we'd been through there on the horse drawn wagons several times on preschool and kindergarten field trips and once in my car one summer when the boys were little, it had been several years and Dracen's memory of the place was vague.  

I don't ever recall it being crowded either so I was a little surprised that we had to sit in the car and wait in a long line just to get to the gate to pay and buy our buckets of feed. I was also miserable because I've been doing a cleanse and had drank approximately 54 gallons of water before we left and my pea-sized bladder was about to explode. I was driving so as soon as we got close enough that I could squeeze my way through the gate, I jumped out of the car, giving Charlie the wheel and ran to the bathroom where I had to WAIT IN LINE. Is there anything worse than waiting in line to pee? 

When I came out they were waiting for me in the parking lot with three feed buckets, one for me and one for each of the boys, and we began our slow drive into the park where we were ambushed by a flock of emus, the first of which had me squealing and rolling my window up because he was all up in my grill demanding food with his long-necked-beady-eyed-self in a skinny minute like Gimme my feed, biotch. NOW!  There is no timidness or shame whatsoever in an emu's feed game. 

But the boys found them hysterical. Even Devin looked happy.

As soon as we rolled away from the emus, a zebra strolled up and I warned the boys, "Don't let the zebras eat out of your hand. They've been known to bite and be careful that they don't steal your bucket!" I barely had the words out of my mouth before this zebra snatched Dracen's right out of his hands nearly bringing him to tears so I quickly surrendered my bucket to him and all was right with the world once more. 

It takes about an hour to drive slowly through the park so Dracen had no problem meeting his up-close-animal-encounter quota for the week...

 There was no shortage of llamas who were all, thankfully, very good-natured and didn't spit on us once.

"Pardon me, but do you have any Grey Poupon?"

The rhino and the giraffes were in enclosures which Dracen got a little bent out of frame about but accepted my explanation that rhinos aren't known for their good tempers and that the giraffes were probably behind a fence for their own protection.

We were surprised to see one of the Chick-fil-A cows there. It must have had the day off.

"Eat more chikin."

After exiting the drive through park, there is another walk-around area to explore...

This lemur was getting ready to pounce on his opponent...

And I thought this kangaroo looked like he wanted to whup up on us. Hard. 

But the thing that had me perplexed as we were walking around was this loud shrieking sound that kept repeating something like "HALP! HALP!"

I finally spotted a young boy making the sound and assumed he was the culprit and thanked my lucky stars he wasn't riding home with me but then we saw them way up in this giant tree...Peacocks. Huh? Peacocks fly and call out for help? 

When we got home Charlie googled it to find out that peacocks will fly up into trees to avoid predators. Who knew? I guess we, the crowd of people, were the predators. Poor peacocks. They're lucky they weren't at the zoo on Monday.

"HALP! HALP!" 

I've been amusing myself with that one ever since.

I guess it's still the little things...