Heat Wave

Yesterday, it got up to around 80 degrees here. On March 1st, no less. It was just a bit overcast with a nice breeze. If I could have ordered a day, I think the weather would have been exactly what I got yesterday.

After my morning routine of feeding, changing, exercising, and doing just a bit of primping, I thought quickly about where I could go with a baby where I could walk outside, have something interesting for me to look at, but wouldn't be so formal that if she completely blew up it would really disrupt everyone around me. I'm not sure why it popped into my head, but I decided the zoo would be a good idea. A quick check of their website gave me directions and confirmed that they were open, so I dressed B in a springy outfit and headed out the door.

Part of the directions put me on 64 East, which made me unbelievably sick for Virginia Beach. I miss it and those of you who are still there a lot.

Just before that, I'd passed the exit for the hospital where I delivered the B. Even though I go there once every other week for the new mom's club, I always think of the nurse who came in and helped me through the only really tough moment I had at the hospital after I had the baby. She helped me so much, and I can't really pay her back personally. I mean, what am I going to do? Hunt her down and follow her until she has a tough moment in her life, and then try to talk her through it? Yet, I can't get it out of my head. I feel like I owe some sort of cosmic debt. In a lame attempt to pay it off, I let every car in who needed to get into my lane over in front of me. This was hardly much of a sacrifice, but it was the only thing I could think of to do with that feeling at the time.

I got to the zoo and discovered that their parking kiosks weren't set up to take credit or debit cards, and I was short $6 on the parking fee. The older man in the booth looked at me and quietly asked, "Are you short on cash, dear?" Without thinking, I answered yes, because I was indeed short by $6. He waved me through and told me to enjoy the zoo with my baby, and it wasn't until I was parking that I wondered how he'd meant his question—did he mean "Are you short on cash at the moment?" or "Are you short on money in general?" As the zoo is free admission, I expect it's a great destination for families without a lot of disposable income, so he could well have assumed that I didn't have a lot of money at all. I then felt bad that I might have mislead him, not to mention that I now owed the world another karmic debt!

Once inside the zoo, I realized that I'd forgotten the digital camera (DOH!) but I just couldn't not take pictures of her very first trip to the zoo. (Not that she will remember it, nor was she conscious for more than five or ten minutes of it.) I bought some sunscreen for her and a disposable camera in the gift shop, and added a $10 donation to the zoo to my payment. With that done, I breathed a sigh of relief that I no longer felt that I owed the zoo the money for my parking and that I could capture a few still moments of our zoo trip.

The zoo was a good idea for a place to take the B, because while it wasn't packed, it wasn't sparsely populated either, and everyone there had a child of some younger age with them. If aliens had landed at the zoo yesterday, they honestly would have had the impression that everyone on the planet was the parent of a child under five years old. Before I had the B, that might have been a different experience for me, but now it's a bit of a relief to be surrounded by other parents who have a much greater chance of understanding if she cries or won't look at me funny for giving her a bottle on one of the park benches. She didn't cry and didn't need a bottle as it turned out. As I alluded before, she slept like a little angel most of the time, and spent about five minutes awake in the penguin house making funny (but silent) faces at all the strange noises she was hearing.

I had forgotten, as it's been years since I've been to a zoo, how odd it is to be walking along and suddenly look up and see a GODDAMNED ELEPHANT! It's so strange. You know it's going to be there. There are signs that you're following...this way for the leopard, that way for the penguins, but they don't prepare you for the shock of oh-my-god-it's-a-hyena-right-there. I got several pictures of B in her stroller, sleeping near the fence separating her from the different animals of the world. They'll be on Flickr and I'll add one to this post as soon as I get the film back from the drugstore today. Forgetting my camera will turn out to be costly. The camera was $10 and the developing and CD will be another $15 probably. Oh well, there are worse things I could have forgotten, like diapers or my wallet or something horrible like that.

My only real regret is that it was a week day and the mister couldn't come with us. We won't see weather like this again for awhile, but I'm really looking forward to the first weekend day that comes along that's even close to that nice. We'll all go out and enjoy her first trip to some other landmark that she can completely sleep through, the three of us, all together.