Forgive the long wait for more on our fun trip to Cleveland. Yesterday we spent the day running errands, mowing the lawn, taking BabyGirl in for another set of shots, unpacking, and goofing off in general. This morning I’ve been having a little trouble with flickr so I’ve been waiting for my pictures to upload. Here we go…
Saturday morning we were up bright and early, if a little groggy from a bad night’s sleep. We headed out to our big destination: The Cleveland Zoo. EAC, our adoption agency, was having a huge reunion and zoo day. We spent the morning looking around the zoo, then had lunch at our pavilion and marched in the EAC “Coming to America” parade around 1:30.
We started out watching the elephants. BabyGirl had never seen real elephants before, so she stayed curled up in the stroller, shaking her finger at them and telling them NO.
We went all through their Australian zone, seeing koalas, kangaroos and wallabies and walking through an open air lorikeet cage. JediBoy enjoyed that, but started to tire out towards the end, so I told him he could share Baby Girl’s stroller and snacks.
We saw a long line for a tram, but since we’d never been to the zoo before, and the maps they give out are not topographical maps, we thought it would be easier to just walk over to the aquarium / gorilla area. (Don’t ask me why the aquarium and gorillas are in the same building.) We found out very quickly why the line for the tram was so long, because the long, desolate and steep hill puts the hill at our local zoo to shame. Fortunately, PisecoDad was up for a turn pushing the “double” stroller.
When we finally made it up the hill, we enjoyed the aquarium. Both kids wanted to be held up at once, and of course my arms were full of precious camera, so PisecoDad had double duty!
JediBoy was absolutely thrilled to see the one male gorilla who wasn’t hiding. He had been talking for weeks about seeing a gorilla at the zoo, and proudly beat his chest at it. He also found out just how big a gorilla’s hand is.
We were starting to get hungry for lunch, back at the bottom of the hill, so we smartly waited in line for the tram this time! Here we are, getting ready to ride down the hill. Baby Girl loved having the wind in her face.
We had a nice picnic lunch at the pavilion - hamburgers and hot dogs, chips and potato salad, yogurt and applesauce for the kids. The place was PACKED but we had several nice conversations with the other families who were sitting at our table and nearby.
After the picnic lunch it was time for the parade. We spent a long time milling about, waiting for the parade to step off. Families congregated by country (we had signs and flags raised to show us where to go). We loved this part of the process - even though we were waiting, we had many great conversations with the other Guatemala families around us, including meeting Tara and Donna.
Finding our place in the crowd:
Making friends…
Meeting Devon…
and Logan. JediBoy and Logan invented some bracelet-tossing game that got them laughing hysterically.
As the waiting stretched on, a lot of dads found themselves in the same position…
Finally ready for the parade to begin!
I learned quickly that it’s hard to take good pictures of a parade you are part of, but it was a huge and wonderful sight. We stopped all those other zoo-goers in their tracks. After the parade, we gathered at the amphitheater for a short presentation by the agency director and representatives from several countries, including Guatemala - and those folks had some very positive things to say about adoptions restarting there soon. Although PisecoDad and I enjoyed all the great news, BabyGirl was done in.
After the parade, we continued to wander the zoo on our own, seeing lots of fun animals and having a great time on a gorgeous day. We made our way over to the “Touch!” exhibit, which has a pool with stingrays and small sharks that you can wait in line to touch.
The whole experience was very typical of our life with JediBoy. When we first saw the exhibit, he was excited and insisted we go in. But as we waited in line, the doubt crept in. How could we be positive the rays wouldn’t sting or the sharks wouldn’t bite? He became more and more afraid and was soon vowing he would NOT put his hand in that water one bit.
It’s so hard to keep your cool in the face of your child’s adamant refusal to try something new. We did our best, though, reading the signs about how the barbs are clipped off like toenails, telling him stories of other touch tanks at Sea World and PisecoDad swimming with the rays as a Boy Scout in Florida. When we got ready to go in, he was willing to say he would stay and watch the rays, but he wouldn’t touch them. We asked him to rinse his arms anyway, in case he changed his mind.
As I kept my hand deep in the water, hoping for my chance, JediBoy did slip closer and closer to me, so that he was pressed against my side when I finally felt my first touch. He could sense my excitement, and see all the other kids loving it, and so he tentatively poked his hand half an inch into the water.
Those of you who know him know where the story will end. I continued to try constantly to talk him into it and talk past his fears. Eventually he had his hand deep in the water and stopped jerking it out whenever the rays swam by. Pretty soon, he felt the magic velvet touch of a ray on his palm, and he was thrilled, ecstatic, and hooked. We stayed for fifteen more minutes, he begged for (and got) a plastic ray on the way out, and talked about almost nothing else for the rest of the day.
The whole experience mirrored, for me, the ongoing discussion on several blogs this month about homeschooling methods: radical unschooling versus child-focused but parent-led schooling. Radical unschooling doesn’t work for our family (at this time) both because JediBoy is truly not good at self-regulation (and loves movies and video games) and also because he is often fearful to try something new, or to try something he thinks he can’t do. He knew his letters at 18 months and his letter sounds at 2, but he wouldn’t try to read out loud until he was almost 5. He could crawl at 6 months and cruise at 9 months but he wouldn’t let go and try to walk until he was 15 months.
Touching that ray was a fantastic experience for him, one he will remember always. But if I had let him make his own decision with no badgering (because really, both PisecoDad and I were keeping up a verbal barrage trying to talk him into it), he would not have had that experience. I would never have forced his hand into the water, of course, but I did everything I could to talk him into it. And he loved it.
After that wonderful time in the Touch! exhibit, we worked out way back out of the zoo, stopping for an hour in their Rain Forest exhibit just outside the main gate. We’d had a great time and we were very tired and ready for dinner.
We drove an exit or two past our hotel to get to a mall area. We had a little dinner in the food court and shopped at the mall’s two brick-and-mortar board game stores, a little slice of heaven for us. We even stopped at a Half Price Books before heading back to the hotel. It was a long day but so much fun!
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