Daniel's 2nd Birthday

Today is Daniel's 2nd birthday. In some ways it seems so crazy that he's 2 already, and in other ways it seems like he's been 2 forever. But either way, the day is here and our youngest boy is now officially 2 years old.

Here he was when he was just born. His face was a little bruised from coming out so fast:


Here he is when he was only 5 months old. He was already a cutie:


Here he is a year ago:


Here he was 2 months ago:


Daniel loves going to the zoo, so despite the fact that it was raining this morning, I took him with his brothers and sister to the zoo for his birthday. He was pretty excited to go. And luckily, not too long after we got there, it stopped raining. The rain did make it so the zoo wasn't crowded at all, so that was nice too.

We started out looking at the monkeys, which are Daniel's favorite. They've got an inside enclosure, which made it nice for when it was raining. After the monkeys, we headed over to look at the lions. They also have an indoor viewing area, so that was nice too. Especially nice because all 3 lions were lying next to the windows there to stay out of the rain. Ben and Daniel were the first over to look at them and were saying hi to the lions, when the male decided they were bugging him and attacked the glass. The boys all thought it was hilarious, of course, so they kept dancing by it and yelling at it to make it do it again, which it did 2 more times. The female next to the male didn't think it was nice to be disturbed from her nap.

Here you can see Ben and Daniel looking at the lions:


Here is the front view of a very sleepy-looking lion:


If you look closely in this picture, you can see that the lion's mouth is open in warning. Yep, there was a half inch of plexiglass between the boys and instant death:


In this picture, Daniel is playing with a penguin:


Here's another view:


Right as we got to the zebra enclosure, the zebras were chasing each other around and making lots of noise. The hyenas nearby thought it was pretty interesting. This one is one of the zebras coming up to say hi:


Here's a shot of both zebras:


This is Alex's picture of the hyenas. They match their rocks, so they're kind of hard to see:


Here are all the boys looking at the hyenas:


Here the boys are playing. Alex is on a camel, the other boys are hatching from an egg:


And here the boys are sitting in the nest:


And just so she's not left out, this is how Abby spent the trip to the zoo:


So it turned out to be a fun trip to the zoo for Daniel's birthday. They got to see lots of action, it wasn't too crowded, and the weather turned out to be perfect. We came home from the zoo and cut up Daniel's birthday watermelon while I baked his birthday cake. Yes, Daniel loves watermelon and was pretty excited to see me cutting it up. He wasn't even interested in the cake when he saw the watermelon. Tonight we'll eat the cake and have Daniel open his presents. I may post pictures of that later.

But anyway, happy birthday, Daniel!