We went to the zoo this afternoon and had to kill some time before the launching of the members-only grand-opening of Parakeet Landing (it was like any old black tie, high heels and champagne deal but without the black ties, high heels and champagne - although they did have cookies and pink lemonade) so we visited the petting farm/zoo and took a walk through the Maryland Wilderness section. They have a set of lilypads for kids to walk on and Kevin missed the step up out of the last one and landed himself in the water up to his knee. Then I parked him in the stroller next to the cows' fence and one of them put its nose between the boards right in Kevin's face and let out the MOO to end all moos scaring the jeepers out of both Kevin and myself. From then on everything was scary - Kevin wouldn't let me walk him in any direction but 180 degrees from the strolling peacock and we had to give the donkey pen a berth of about 15 feet. I told Kevin they don't moo but he didn't buy it.
So we headed toward the "special birds" (I had to give some name for the reason we were visiting the zoo without seeing the Almighty Giraffes because hey, they're a mile away from anywhere we need to be and we just saw them on Monday - come on, kid, you just saw them on Monday.) Kevin kept saying, "No - no special birds!" and I decided, this once, to ignore him. We got in line and he stopped saying No because there were too many people in line with us to be scared about that he couldn't speak. We went inside with our $1 seed stick to bring the birds right to us because the lady at the gate couldn't believe it when I said I wasn't interested in taking one in this time - she manhandled me into buying one. So we went inside and people were holding their seed sticks in the air and birds were coming right down on them to eat! I asked Kevin if he wanted to put his arm in the air for the birds to come to it and he was already there holding his hand over my head. Hmm... he wasn't as scared as I'd hoped.
We couldn't get any birds to come to our stick so I meandered around pretending to look for congregating legions of hungry birds. Then a very nice, well-meaning man with a white parakeet (?) on his seed stick said, "Here, why don't you put your finger out for him to climb on and then he'll eat your seed." This is where I expected the Mommy Adrenaline to kick in. It didn't... it was more like Mommy Amitriptyline*. I was so calm about the whole thing I'm not sure what was going on.
All in all it was fun because Kevin really seemed to enjoy it and I didn't freak out. And we gave Andy about an hour at home after work by himself, which is always good (for all of us.)
*Note: I was on amitriptyline for about 6 weeks, I think, as preventive therapy for my migraines. It turned me into a zombie and I hardly remember anything except for feeling when I went off the medication that I had just woken up after a long dream. It was a good case study for the idea that people who aren't depressed shouldn't be put on anti-depressants.
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