Well, I wish I could say I took a Thanksgiving Break or went away on a holiday trip, but, no, hospitals don’t close and I was working this past week.

I have to tell you, though, that I am thankful for the ability to work and enjoy what I do.  Over the past few weeks, I’ve also had experiences that make me appreciate my children even more than I did previously.

I have had the conversation about being a pediatrician many times.  Sometimes, I’ll hear, “Gosh, I could never deal with sick kids, that seems so difficult!” and I’ll cheerily reply, “Oh, most kids bounce back and get better!  It’s actually a very happy profession.”  (I’m not a Heme/Onc or PICU doctor, mind you.) Well, my partner normally covers our rehab hospital, but since she’s been on maternity leave, I did my first stint out there.

It really makes you take account of what you have and how quickly things can change because most of these kids were happily going about their normal day and were healthy and normal until some life changing event occurred -car accidents, gun shot wounds, an infection- changed their and their families lives forever.  The parents that I met were awe-inspiring and some of the kids had such a positive outlook, it was almost surreal. 

I urge you to hug your kids and your family a little tighter today.  If nothing else, it sure does feel good!

So, I’m back, stronger and more reflective from my experiences these past few weeks, and thankful for wonderful family and friends, and, even all that hard work I’m enduring!

Our day trip this past weekend took us to the small town of Glen Rose, Texas, population ~2000.

Fossil Rim

The first place we hit was Fossil Rim Park, which is wildlife park where you can feed the animals from your car as you tour the grounds.  I had done my research and found that they keep the place open for 2 hours after they let the last car in.  One would deduce that it then takes about 2 hours to get through the park. 

My research also led to the discovery that, indeed, we had a coupon in our Entertainment Passbook for One FREE Child Admission.  Perfect.  Benjamin is still free because he could care less about what happens around him.  It took us about 2 hours to get there from Plano including a quick stop for lunch.  Ogre went in and bought the admission as well as a bag of animal feed that cost us about 8 bucks.

The first animal we meet is an ostrich.  First, let me tell you that I’ve only had bad experiences with ostriches, I think they’re mean SOBs.  One bit my palm when I fed it at the State Fair and I never tried to feed or interact with one again. So here we are, face to face with another ostrich, it’s the first animal we meet on our drive, so everyone’s excited to feed the animal.  This ostrich was not hear to play.  He wanted some food, he knew the drill and he just stuck his long old neck INSIDE our car to try to get the bag sitting on the center console.  And he would not stop staring us down.  Ogre finally threw some feed away from the car to get it away.  I laughed my ass off at the sight of this!!  Poor Ogre had this ostrich staring him down and kept trying to reach its head in to the car and Ogre is trying to hide the food.  Ahhh, I loved it.  I still laugh.

So once we got away from the sketch ostrich, we drove around and Mina was excited to match up the animals with her little guide about the animals and then Papa would read what it said about the animals.  We founds so many different animals and were very impressed about how sweet and tame many of them were.

THEN, we meet another ostrich, on my side this time and I had Benji up front with me.  Man, those things are crazy.  I don’t why they have this reputation of being scared and sticking their holes in the ground.  These ones had no issues intimidating humans.  I went into mother mode and had to “protect my young.”  I shielded Benji from crazy ostrich while telling Ogre to GO!  But alas, Ogre was in Karma mode and instead, happily snapped away with the camera.  He finally decided to drive off when the thing started pecking at our car.  Save the car, forget about the children.

There were several of these Deer that were very sweet, yet, very pushy.  They would see a car and I guess it’s Pavolovian, they would walk up to get food and it was pretty difficult to get them to go away. 

The neatest part for everyone was getting to see zebras and giraffes up close.  We followed park instructions and did not hand feed the zebras, but through the feed on the ground.

Another good laugh I got was getting a good picture of the giraffe picking his nose with his tongue. 

Ogre and Mina both got to hand feed the giraffes and they really thought that was very cool!

By the time we hit the Outlook area and Gift Shop, it’d been 2 hours.  As we drove up to this area we saw a sign warning us that there was still another HOUR of driving after this point.  WTF??  Another hour??  Ack, we still wanted to go to the Dinosaur Valley State Park.  We decided to forego this part and hightail it (the best we could, obviously) through the rest of the park. 

We did not stop to feed as many animals as we did before and just leisurely drove the rest of the way and stopped here and there to look at the cheetahs and rhinocerous, but it only took us about 20 minutes to finish up, so that was good. 

This was definitely a fun trip and well worth our time and money.  Only Benjamin could have cared less, but we’ll be back when he’s older.

Dinosaur Valley State Park

Next we drove over to Dinosaur Valley State Park.  It’s only about a 5-10 minute drive from Fossil Rim.  We stopped to look at the dinosaur replicas and learned some new things.  For example, what I’ve always called Brontosaurus are called Apatosaurus.  Who knew?  Also, while they have replicas of the Apatosaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex, these are not the dinos that left tracks here.  The tracks are from the Cretaceous Period and were left by Acrocanthosaurus (the one they thought was T rex) and Pleurocoelus (the one that they thought was an Apatosaurus, or what I call a Brontosaurus).

Fast Forward, we went to Blue Hole #1 first.  Let me tell you that if you’re goal is to do some fun hiking, this is a cool place to start. When your goal is to see some dinosaur fossil tracks and you’ve got an 18 month old, this part is low yield.  It’s a mildly treacherous (definitely doable, though) steep downward climb to the creek bank where you do get to see a few (we found 2) dinosaur tracks.  But then it’s the same treacherous hike back up.

The best place for seeing tracks is #2.  It’s a nice, easy paved walk to some stairs that lead you to the river, that you have to cross, to get to the tracks.  I don’t know what happens when the river is up, but for us, it was just walking across rocks to get there.  Another good tip: WEAR GOLASHES OR DUCK BOOTS!  We thought ahead and for Mina, she had the best time splashing around in areas where the water was shallow, which was quite a few places!!

There is an impressive area where a chase and kill site is fossilized.  But even better than that, there was just a lot of areas to explore and roam around with.  Ogre and I just kept good sight of the kids, particularly Benji and we had a great time in this area!

We did check out Sites #3 and #4, but unfortunately, #3 has pretty much eroded away and there isn’t anything to see.  And site #4 was screened by Ogre and Mina and they found that it was not feasible with Benji and little more arduous for our day trip.

While they were checking out #4, I was able to get a good look at the campsites, and I think that we’ll definitely be back to camp and hike about this park.  It has a great set up with each campsite having electricity and a picnic table with fire pit and some even have BBQ pits as well.  There is also a central location for bathrooms and showers and some playgrounds.  So you’re roughing it, but not ROUGHING it. 

And to make a great day even better, we stopped to eat dinner in town at a great little BBQ joint that was thouroughly enjoyed by all of us, it’s called The Ranch House and was quite tasty, you can read about that here.

All in all, I would highly recommend this day trip to check out animals and dinosaur tracks, but it would also make for a fun weekend trip, too.

And so you can’t call me unfair or unbalanced, they have one of these on the way to the dinosaur park:

And, just for the record, I believe that both creationism and evolution are theories.  Theories, which I don’t believe can be justly denounced or proven, so I respect both positions. 

Details:

• Fossil Rim Park
• Pricing Calendar
• Dinosaur Valley State Park

Our Day Trip to the Dallas Zoo

Well, it was another beautiful weekend in Dallas and we were not going to waste it!

We surprised the kids, well, Mina, with a trip to the zoo.  Benji is always just along for the ride.

I was very excited to use my new Happy Hallow membership card.  I learned about this through DFW Area Moms and procrastinated signing up long enough for them to offer a 2 years for the price of 1 year membership.  I think this is going to be a great deal for the Team Phipps excursions!

Family Picture, Elephants Representing Mommy

We arrived around 1 oclock and headed first toward the African exhibits by the Sting Ray exhibit and penguins as we were looking forward to riding the monorail.  Unfortunately, the entire section distal to the Sting Ray exhibit was closed!! 

Mina checking out the penguinos

Mina...not very tall

The kids also did not get to truly enjoy or experience touching the stingrays (which costs 2.50 per person and I am unsure how much longer they will have this exhibit) because their arms were too short.  Ogre and I were able to feel them and they were slimy.  Mina did get to touch one of the spiny ones that have pinchers because one of the zoo ladies pulled it out for her and taught us how to identify the male ones by their pinchers.  That was pretty cool.

We stopped and perused by a few of the animals before heading back to Zoo North.  Mina started to complain that she was hungry.  We headed up to the Food Court and got some lunch for the kids.  I was a little annoyed because there weren’t very many open tables as they were setting up for some private function.  I don’t think that’s very fair for the daily zoo patrons, but we were able to find a table so I can’t complain too much.

Next, we headed to the “Children’s Zoo.”  I was surprised to see so many kids walking and ROLLING through the “river” that ran through the play area (it’s just water that runs over a designated area about 3 inches deep).  One kids was totally soaked.  Our kids would not be participating in that.  There was a little play area and a place where the kids could ride ponies.  More interesting to our geeky little family was the aviary.  We went in to see the birds and Mina was lucky enough to have one of the birds on her arm courtesy of a kind zookeeper, she thought it was “itchy” and later told me it was her favorite part of the zoo!

We decided that this area was not so exciting and headed off to Zoo North.  Being somewhat strapped for time, we asked Mina what animals she would prefer to see and she decided on the giraffes, tigers, and elephants.  We managed to see all of those animals -the tiger was the hardest to catch a glimpse of.  The giraffes and elephant were in the “cage” part (I don’t know what the real word is for that part of their habitat -they are free to go back and forth, but it’s not the part that looks more natural).

Ogre reminded that THE elephant we saw was Jenny, of the contraversial where should we move Jenny to?  After all that discussion, she’s going to be staying in Dallas.

Another fun area was the reptile and amphibian exhibit.  Benji learned what a snake (sneh) was and the sound it makes “Sssss.”  He (and Mina) loved this.  Ogre loved pointing out to me the Rat Snake, which we’ve found on our back porch before and the one on our porch was probably 5 feet long!  And they emit a skunk like smell!  UGH!!!  There is also a tropical aviary in this exhibit, again, a favorite for our family.

We saw more animals and passed a beautiful bird exhibit with the Harpey Eagle (Mina learned about these on Go Diego Go), a Condor (my favorite animal from the zoo) and the Bald Eagle (I wonder if this was Ogre’s favorite, he’s a patriotic kind of guy).

Mina’s favorite exhibit was the Bug Exhibit because she saw bees making honey.  She and her Papa had a great time talking about all the bugs.  Benji was rather bored and we went outside to walk around.

About this time, we decided it was time to go since we needed to eat dinner and get home with enough time for me to get to work.  It was great and we are excited for the next time that we come, when we will be more prepared so Mina can ride the Carousel (requires cash to buy tokens -you can actually use a credit card in the children’s zoo to buy tokens, but we opted not to), we can see the rhinoceroses and cheetahs that we had to skip this time around, and hopefully ride the monorail!!

Details for the Dallas Zoo:

• $5 for parking
• $8.75 for adults
• $5.75 for aged 3-11
• $5.00 65+
• Open 9-5 daily (til 4 in the winter)

If you have one of the Happy Hallow memberships, admission is free!  So you just have to pay for parking, greasy food, expensive animal shaped bottled sugar drinks, souvenirs they’ll play with only today, extra exhibits that are worthless to your short armed children, and carousel rides!  Woo-hoo!