Visiting the Dallas Zoo

In May we took a week long family trip to Dallas as a piggyback on my husband's business travel. One of my favorite things to do with my daughters is visit the zoo, so I've made it a fun goal to visit different zoos across the country when the opportunity presents itself.

We actually ended up visiting the Dallas Zoo two days in a row. This was in part because of my sprained ankle that happened the day before our flight and because I spent most of first day in the Zoo North part of the park, only realizing at the very end that the Wilds of Africa part was worthy of an additional day as well. Luckily I have an annual membership at our local zoo which granted me discounted tickets to any AZA accredited zoo, so it was totally affordable to go twice!

It's kind of fun getting to seeing a different zoo that is across the country because animals behave differently based on the climate. Seattle is very temperate and you don't get a lot of extreme weather, but I'm sure that the warm climate creatures missing their natural sunshine. For the time we spent in Dallas it was in the mid 80's, fairly humid with scattered thunder showers. It was amusing to see what thunder showers mean to Texans versus what it means to a Washingtonian. In Western Washington we really don't get a whole lot of thunder storms. But when the thunder started rolling at the Dallas Zoo, I quickly saw the umbrellas and ponchos get broken out. Then it started to rain...and it was warm. Yes, the stereotype is mostly true, it rains a lot in Washington but a girl gets used to it. But warm rain, on a hot day, was actually nice! It was funny to notice that difference.

At the age of 3, Penny is really into dinosaurs. We even had a fairy-dinosaur joint birthday party for per and Ruby back in March. So imagine this girl's glee when we walk into the park and she spots something very peculiar on the ground..

Nope, we definitely don't have these in Seattle!

It was awesome witnessing her reaction to seeing "real" dinosaurs; as most of these were animatronic and fairly realistic, even to an adult.

She also had to make sure that each dinosaur was appropriately roared at.

Onward we went and discovered The Steam, which was a play area designed to look like a stream for children (and their parents) to cool off in. We spent a lot of time here, wading through the water, Penny jumping from different rock features and Ruby testing the waters as she toddled around.

But the part of the zoo that has me raving about is the Wilds of Africa portion. It was truly impressive because of the truly open layout of the savannah that momentarily takes you away from a zoo in Texas to actually seeing what it looks like in nature. As a matter of fact, this was the first exhibit in North America to combine elephants with zebras, giraffes, impalas, ostriches and guinea fowl in the same habitat!  

The Woodland Park Zoo recently transitioned their elephant herd to the Tulsa Zoo and it was incredibly surprising to see how many elephants the Dallas Zoo has; at one point I photographed 5 in the same picture.

Penny enjoyed the giraffe exhibit as well - the giraffe heads were at eye level with us so we were able to get pretty close to them. Sadly we just learned that the little baby in the herd died last week because of an injury.

Stay tuned for more of our adventures in Dallas, Texas!
Part 1: Getting there and staying at The Omni

Have you visited the Dallas Zoo? 

Tell me about your favorite exhibit!

Catch up on my other zoo trips across North America!

A Fairy-Dinosaur Party

Yet another post that has been a few months in the making! The girls celebrated their birthdays in March, and I'm just now getting around to filling you all in on the details. Whoops!

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Penny and Ruby shared their birthday celebrations again this year. Last year we held off on Penny's birthday celebration because we weren't quite sure when Ruby would be born (she was born a week after Penny's 2nd birthday), then we rolled together a "meet the baby" with Penny's party. We decided to keep the tradition going and celebrated them together again this year.

To give myself a few months of preparation I asked Penny (who would be turning 3) what kind of party she would like. She thought about this and very seriously responded that she wanted a fairy party with a "sharp tooth" birthday cake. We had watched the original Land Before Time and she was also quite in love with Dinosaur Train, so it made sense that this would be combined with the overall obsession with all things princessy that has lasted the last 9 months or so. And thus, the idea behind the fairy-dinosaur birthday party was born.

I wanted the party to be a memorable one for Penny and her friends. Alas, I'm not terribly crafty thanks to the wonders of Pinterest I was able to pull off a budget-friendly themed party by thrifting and asking around for most of our items.

First, I have to show you this.

Isn't she adorable? I talked to Carly when I was planning the party and she came up with this little cutie. I had a clay cake topper made for Penny's first birthday as well, so I guess this will be our first birthday tradition in our family. Carly's shop is full of different cake topper ideas. Once I found the little dino that I liked, she got the colors down and added the adorable touches like the little hair bow (which actually ended up being very similar to the hair bows that Penny and Ruby wore at their party) and even the little eyelashes for the final girly touch. There's a special shelf in my Sister Room that I have in mind to display these special treasures. Be sure to check out her shop for a handmade cake topper!

No party is complete in my mind without delicious food, so I made sure that our menu was catered towards toddler appetites, keeping a minimum on sticky fingers and messes as well as having a dinosaur theme.

On the menu - 

• Watermelon T-rex heads
• Stegasaurus eggs (deviled eggs with a twist)
• T-rex teeth (cheese triangles)
• Pteranadon wings (chicken wings)
• Corpolite (meatballs)
• Bronto Chow (veggie platter)
• Chips and Lava (chips and salsa)
• Primordial ooze cups - instead of traditional cake, I made dirt cups and added gummy dinosaurs on top. My husband made this awesome platter!

You've probably seen something similar floating around on Pinterest, but it's truly not that hard to make. Just make sure that the models that you use are solid and not hollow.

I also made this awesome paper birthday banner, which is the pinnacle of my craftiness but it came out really well! I learned a lot from making this one, so I think I'll try my hand at it again for different seasons or events.

The only other decoration that I used were thrifted dinosaur models, which I added tutus and wings to. A little bit of frilly pink lace, hand cut wings and hot glue did the trick.

Ok, I've talked about food (check), decorations (check), now for the fun, right? The weather was forcasted as an unseasonably warm 65 degrees, so I decided that we'd have a dinosaur egg hunt. It was about 3 weeks before Easter, so sourcing the eggs wasn't hard. We hid over 200 eggs in the yard and with almost 2 dozen toddlers in attendance, it wasn't a very long egg hunt at all!

My mom also painted a cute mural inspired by the shark birthday party that we were invited to last summer.

We ended with a little birthday song and more fun time with friends.

Can't wait to see what next year's theme is!

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Disclosure: I received product in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are my own.