First day in Houston

For spring break we drove down to Houston to visit my cousins, Amy and Kim, and their families.  We have been wanting to visit them but haven't wanted to brave the heat and humidity of the summer.  We figured spring break would be a good time to go plus Brian and I had an extra day off (Easter Monday).  We stayed with Amy and her family first.  They have twin boys who are 3 but will be 4 in June.  Jaden and Cody loved Natalie. They always wanted to be holding Natalie's hand or playing with Natalie.  It was really cute.  Here they are playing together.

We decided to head to the zoo as my family loves visiting zoos.  Here's what we looked like walking in and various times throughout the zoo (Brian picked the right shirt for the day).  Natalie generally did a very good job keeping track of where Jaden and Cody went.  I think Cody liked holding Natalie's hand the best.  (Notice our attire-pants, shoes, short sleeve shirts and hoodies-that is what we wore most days in Houston-it didn't get warm until the weekend).

The Houston zoo has lots of cool animals although my kids did want to see the polar bears and penguins (can't imagine why the Houston zoo wouldn't have those!).  We did see quite a few elephants which is nice since we can't see elephants up here.

While we were looking at the cats we noticed some loud howling and went to investigate.  The gibbons were doing their twice daily territorial call.  It went on for quite some time.  Here's a brief snippet of what they sound like.  I have a longer video which is better but I didn't think you wanted to listen to almost a minute of it.

 The zoo had some nice things for kids to touch and play with.  One was a small African village with small huts and drums.  The kids really liked playing the drums.

 They have a nice Children's Zoo area.  Natalie, Jaden and Cody liked brushing the goats but Noah isn't huge on that so he and I went to see the Mongooses.  Noah wanted to see prairie dogs but they didn't have any so he had to settle for Mongooses and Meerkats.

Amy, Jaden and Cody headed back a little bit before we did since the boys generally have some rest time.  I think  they fell asleep in the car on the way back.  We really appreciated them staying out various times in the afternoon and forgoing nap time at home!  Brian, N2 and I went to see the rest of the animals at the zoo and then headed over to see the beach trash art exhibit.  It was neat to see what they made but it was sad to see how much trash they were able to uncover.