We dropped Brandon off today at Fort Dix, for a week of Basic Encampment for the Civil Air Patrol. He will be gone for 7 days - whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa - I am going to miss him sooo much!! Before we dropped him off, we went on a family outing to a privately owned zoo with some really cool animals. It was a good size zoo, sitting on some farmland, and it was pretty clean. I have to say it was a bit different than your regular city zoo, not just because of the animals, but because of how close you were able to get to the animals, and the signs that were hung all around.

Hyenas...

Leg of cow in the hyena cage...

The wolves were beautiful...

There were lots of monkeys and baboons with signs like this everywhere...

The PVC tubing on the top left corner of this picture is a feed tube. The monkeys will go and sit by this tube and wait for the visitors to put food, purchased at the front of the zoo specifically to feed the animals, down the tube. It is hysterical...

This monkey is a new mommy...

So is this monkey...

Among some of the more interesting animals were a Coati...

Aardvark (actually two, in the feed bucket, fighting over the food)...

This rock was laying next to the wild boar cage (don't have a picture of the boar - he was a bore:)), and Reagan got excited because he said it was a "pig egg"! (There were eggs in all of the various bird cages:))

Lemur...

7 month old Camel...

We knew this zoo was different when Joshua grew a donkey head out of his own head...

Never saw the peacocks that this sign mentions...

Saw a turkey...

Some beautiful pheasant...

And this "Fancy Rooster"... (we liked him a lot)

This bird won the hearts of all the boys...

I have to say that the family favorite was the giraffes. They had 9 of them at the zoo, 7 adults and 2 babies. One of the babies is still without a name and they are having a contest to see who can come up with the best name. The mother's name is Matata, so Brandon entered the name Hakuna. I think his name is going to win:). You can see in this photo how incredibly close we got to them, and how enormous they are.

Elli stayed awake for the whole zoo visit - she was super good just looking around...

and playing in her stroller...

After our visit to the zoo we dropped Brandon off:(...