National Zoo

All Aglitter: ZooLights at the National Zoo

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 1 Comment

My son’s eyes and mouth went wide when he spotted the blue tree. Festooned in lights, it was far from anything natural, but it was sure pretty. This past Sunday, we attended ZooLights, an annual month-long event at the National Zoo that turns it into a winter wonderland.

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Trudging up the big hill to the Zoo from the Metro station, I yelled, “The lights! We’re almost there!” We were greeted with a wall of sparkling blue, transforming into a melange of additional colors as we got closer. A sign proclaiming ZooLights featured a red panda wagging its tail, a likeness of the naughty animal that escaped the Zoo last year.

Anteater Zoolights

While most of the real animals were sleeping, a whole menagerie awaited us in lights. Hummingbirds flapped their wings, snakes swayed, lizards smacked flies with their tongues and an eagle joined its mate in a high-up nest. My favorites were the surreal ocean animals and the quirky naked mole rats. Sprout seemed to like the anteater slurping up ants as they came out of their hill, although he shied away from the snake.

Zoolights hummingbird

We did see one animal, although it was sleeping. We received a stuffed bison from my uncle for Christmas, so I wanted to show Sprout a real one. Unfortunately, as Sprout said, he was “a little scared” by its size. While he had nothing to be afraid of at the zoo, that will serve him well if he ever visits out West at least.

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But Sprout’s favorite part wasn’t even inside anyway – it was the model train display inside the main visitor’s center. Thomas and Friends, along with a Lego train, chugged by zoo animals, miniature town halls, storefronts, fishermen crabbing, and even chefs breaking down the seafood on the beach. Sprout could have stood there all night if we’d let him. Judging by the crowd of kids against the fence separating them from the trains, he wasn’t the only one.

The Visitor’s Center wasn’t the only busy place – the whole zoo was pretty full. While the event is normally very popular, the 60-plus degree weather really drew out the crowds. I’d imagine there were long lines to get food or go on the rides (like carousel or slide), but it was fine if you just wanted to see the lights. We only noticed it when there was a bottleneck.

We ended up seeing a little less and leaving a little earlier than expected because Sprout was falling asleep in his stroller. While he usually likes to get out and walk around a bit, he just responded with a sigh and “no” whenever we asked. His eyes were fluttering when we got back to the Visitor’s Center, where we planned to change him into pajamas in the hope he’d sleep on the train ride home. Of course, that was invigorating and he didn’t come even close to falling asleep until we put him in his crib.

However, his newfound energy did come in handy when he and Chris caught sight of “Panda Claus,” a person in a panda bear outfit with a Santa hat. Sprout thought high-fiving the panda was just fantastic and mentioned it several times on the way home. I suspect he was a bit disappointed when I showed him the actual, cute but kind of boring pandas on the Zoo’s PandaCam yesterday morning.

Besides the lights themselves, one of the things I like best about ZooLights is the price -free!  It’s easier on my wallet, which is nice, but it also opens it up to a lot of families who might not be able to participate. A lot of Christmas activities are astoundingly expensive – looking at you, Ice at the National Harbor – so it’s great that this is open to everyone.

While we don’t have too many Christmas traditions yet, visiting the ZooLights is very likely to become one of them. In fact, we’ve already promised Sprout that we’ll be back again next year.

Thankful for All of Our Families

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 3 Comments

We have so much to be thankful for. That’s never been more apparent than this past Thanksgiving, when we had not just one, but two different feasts with our church and biological families.

Usually, we trek home to upstate New York for Thanksgiving. But as it takes us close to 10 hours to get there and we’re going home for Christmas, we had no desire to make that drive twice in a month. Plus, a quirk of bad work scheduling means that I am traveling the first two weeks of December.

Instead, this year our parents came to us. I’m an only child, so it was simple for my mom and dad. For Chris’s parents, it was a bit more complicated – his sister lives in Las Vegas. As they couldn’t be on two coasts simultaneously, we delayed our Thanksgiving until Saturday.

Nonetheless, we carried out some Thanksgiving traditions on Thursday. Chris baked off Pillsbury cinnamon rolls, a treat his family has every holiday. We plopped on the couch for the Macy’s parade, which enthralled Sprout. He grooved to the Broadway numbers, tried to lift his leg like the Rockettes, “toot toot”ed at the Thomas the Train balloon, and loved the Sesame Street float.

With the afternoon free, we joined our church’s Thanksgiving dinner. We have one every year for congregants who aren’t leaving town, along with any family or friends they bring. This year, it was Chris, Sprout and I, my parents, another couple from our church with a small child, my pastor and his family, and one of my pastor’s homeless friends. The table was full of conversation and laughter. One of the more amusing incidents was my pastor’s son describing an imaginary Blue’s Clues parody that involved Blue rabidly attacking the videocamera and Steve using Slippery Soap to take a shower. While it was pretty funny, his dad shut it down before it got even longer and more inappropriate.

After dinner, several of us participated in the nerd-traditional post-meal activity of playing video games, namely an eight-person game of Super Smash Brothers. I couldn’t figure out where my character was half of the time, but it was a lot of fun. While the babies couldn’t play, they kept busy building towers out of Megablocks. Later on, we put them on the piano bench and they played the cutest little duet I’ve ever seen. While it sounded like a modernist sound piece, they were tapping on the keys rather than banging, which was impressive for a couple of toddlers.

That night, we pulled out the board and card games. After a couple games, my dad headed to bed while Chris, my mom, and I stayed up with a bottle of red wine. Although I had earlier insisted that six bottles of wine was too much for the weekend, I was clearly wrong. A couple of glasses each fueled a conversation about drunken escapades, poorly thought-out decisions, and other quirks of adulthood that was so engaging that we completely lost track of our game of 500 Rummy.

My in-laws arrived on Friday night, making the party complete. I’m extraordinarily fortunate to have a great relationship with them. As Chris and I were high-school sweethearts, I basically grew up with them.

Despite all of the company, I was relaxed. While I sometimes get defensive when visitors help with the dishes or clean my house, I accepted the assistance. As the grandparents adored playing with Sprout, I was happy to give them that time. At work, I’ve been sprinting from one project to another, so it was good to physically and mentally rest.

Thanksgiving dinner was similarly lacking in disaster. The menu was fairly traditional – turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole, canned cranberry sauce (with ridges, of course), Crescent rolls, green beans, corn, and carrots. As it was the first Thanksgiving we ever hosted, we made some compromises – my family’s sweet potato casserole instead of his apples and yams, his canned cranberry sauce instead of my cranberry jello mold. We made about a million trips to the store and ran the dishwasher about 10 times, but that happens any time Chris takes on a big cooking project. The only thing that didn’t go quite according to plan was that for all of our existing kitchen equipment, we had to buy a turkey baster after the bird already went in the oven.Our Thanksgiving turkey.

We even had time for some family activities. Heading over to the park, we found out that Sprout is very interested in basketball but tragically a little too short to play it yet. Our park has a “funnel ball” game, where you toss a ball up into a big funnel and it falls out of one of three holes. The adults were playing it, although we weren’t very good at actually getting it in the hoop. After watching us, Sprout took his ball, walked up to the pole supporting the funnel, stood up on his tip-toes, and threw it as hard as he could. Which was about three inches. And then he did it again and again. He was convinced that if he just tried hard enough, he would get it in. When we lifted him up to help him out, he was just pissed that he was still too short to get it in the funnel. He finally got so frustrated that we had to move on to a different part of the playground to prevent a full-blown tantrum. I had to admire his can-do spirit though.

The last day, we went to the National Zoo to see their Christmas light display. Needless to say, it was far more successful than our last trip there. While many of the exhibits were closing when we arrived, we saw some animals who are often hiding in the heat. Sprout watched the furry beaver intently as it ambled along and then splashed into the water. As he woofed at the wolf, it sulked by and then cast an intense gaze on him. He also liked the farm animals, especially the huge Holstein cow who had an astoundingly low moo. But his favorite part was the holiday train display, where he just stared at the three levels of trains going around and around and around for a good ten minutes.

I’m so grateful that I could spend the holidays with so many people who are both weird and wonderful.

A Tale of Two Day Trips

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 1 Comment

We’ve had a lot of visitors the last few weeks with my parents visiting two weeks ago and my in-laws visiting last weekend. While they both came to see Sprout, no one really wants to sit around the house the whole weekend. So we took some day trips: one to the National Zoo and one to the Maryland side of Great Falls. While both were good ideas in theory, they did teach us about the right – and wrong – ways to bring a baby on adventures.

My mom was very keen on bringing Sprout to the zoo for the first time. After the success of the aquarium trip, she justifiably thought he would enjoy seeing the animals.

Unfortunately, we totally botched the timing – we went on peak Cherry Blossom weekend, the height of tourist activity in D.C. On top of this annual surge was the massive interest in the baby panda born earlier this year. On top of all of this, it was also the first nice spring weekend, as we’ve had weather alternating between unseasonable cold and unpleasant rain most weekends. It added up to a big honking mess, with both us and the zoo being unprepared for the people swarming the place. Between the crowds and the poorly-designed map, it took more than an hour to get a very overpriced and under-flavored counter-service lunch. While my mom, Dylan and I sat on a bench and waited (and waited and waited), Chris and my dad walked almost half-mile looking for a food stand before ending up exactly where they started. Then, they waited 45 minutes in a line with absolutely no shade. To add insult to injury, every single vending machine was out of ice cream, soda and water and all of the water fountains were broken. As my mom doesn’t like crowds, Chris wilts in the sun, and I get cranky when I’m hungry, we were destined for disaster.

Even our baby’s beautiful smile couldn’t cheer us up much, because he wasn’t all that happy himself. When we were in the vaunted panda exhibit, he didn’t even seem to notice them, decided that he was really hungry and started crying. The elephants were too far away to make much of an impact of him – they could have been cars, for all that he could tell. Even in the gorilla house, he was far more interested in the little girl’s braids in front of him than the animal. Of all of the exotic species, his favorite part was the farm animals and even there he seemed more interested in the split wood fence than the cows or llamas.

In contrast, our trip to Great Falls went beautifully, although not without its hiccups. It certainly helped that the temperatures were cooler and the crowds less dense. We took the stroller along the C&O Canal, then a series of waterfall overlooks. Sprout seemed fascinated by the waterfalls, leaning forward in his stroller and watching them with real focus. The loud noise, expansive view and constant motion held his attention, even though he didn’t know what he was looking at. The only quirk in the trip was that I hadn’t learned from the weekend before and once again failed to bring any food or drink for the adults. And of course, the water fountains were also broken there. (What the heck, federal government?) We ended up eating at a nearby restaurant, but if we had planned and brought a picnic, we would have saved some money and possibly been able to go on the boat ride.

Thinking about these experiences, I think I’ve learned some lessons about going on trips with the baby:

1) Know your own limits and be flexible to accommodate them. If there are a bunch of different factors that don’t mesh well with your group – crowds, heat – just say no to that trip. I really should have known better than to go to the zoo on Cherry Blossom weekend.

2) Pick destinations based on what everyone wants to do, not just on what the baby might enjoy. What infants like or comprehend is really unpredictable. We thought Sprout would like the zoo because he liked the aquarium. But that’s thinking like an adult. While we thought he liked the animals, it’s more likely that liked the fish’s close-up quick movements and bright colors, which the zoo lacked. Even if it’s guaranteed to be baby-friendly, the kid might just be in a mood that day. At least if you pick something everyone has some interest in seeing, you’ll enjoy it even if the baby is apathetic.

3) Remember to pack for yourself, not just the baby. We packed a bunch of stuff for Sprout that we didn’t use, but we didn’t pack any food for the adults either trip.

4) Be aware of strollers’ limitations. The limits on where strollers can go wasn’t a big deal on either of these trips because the zoo houses that banned strollers were too crowded anyway. However, this has been really important in the past when we visited the aquarium and art museum, both of which didn’t allow them. In addition, strollers really limit kids’ ability to see. Sprout would have been able to see everything much better in both locations if we had the baby backpack. Instead, we had to keep taking him in and out of the stroller.

5) Be thoughtful about timing. We left for the zoo after Sprout’s morning nap and hoped we could get him to sleep in the stroller in the afternoon. As a result, we hit everything during the busiest, hottest part of the day. For the Great Falls trip, he refused to take a morning nap, so we left a lot earlier. In the future, I think we’ll be better off if we try to do the morning nap en route and get home for the afternoon one.

Of course, all of this could change tomorrow! But that’s the nature of parenthood, whether you set venturing out or staying at home – you learn what you can from the past and adjust on the fly as necessary.