Life in the fast lane

Yesterday was my company "Day at the Zoo." We had free passes to everything at the zoo, and you can bet we took advantage of that!

We went to church in the morning and then went to the company-provided lunch at the zoo. We didn't really see many animals this time (although we did get to see the baby Amur tiger cubs and watch them play!) but we spent all of our time doing the things we normally don't do because there's a charge. We went on the train (many, many times), rode the carousel, saw the sea lion show, and went on two simulators.

That's where the day was interesting.

The boys have never been on any rides of any sort with us. We had talked about taking them to Six Flags this summer but it just didn't work out. They're still too little for a lot of the rides so it wasn't a big deal not to go, and they don't know what they're missing. :) But our passes to the zoo yesterday included rides in two simulators, and we thought this would be a great opportunity to try the boys out on them. I'm laughing just thinking about it.

I was mainly nervous not for the "ride" part but because we didn't know the content of the movies; i.e., how scary they would be. And while most 5 and 6 year olds might not be scared, our boys have been exposed to a lot less Western culture (unlike the 4 year old in Zhenya's preschool class who has seen "Hellboy." Don't these children have parents?!?) and since they haven't seen much TV I'm not sure how well they distinguish between fantasy and reality. But we opted to go for it and since the chairs are set up in pairs Mark rode with Dima and Zhenya rode with me. The first one we went on was an "Extreme Log Ride."

They loved it. LOVED it.

The second simulator was a dinosaur movie--sort of. It had dinosaurs in it, for all of maybe one minute of the 5 minutes in the simulator. The boys also liked that one, but it was 3D and I don't think they liked the dinosaurs coming at them as much as they liked the log ride. :) But neither of them seemed to think it was scary. We were careful not to prep them to think it was scary. I did prep them before the log ride and reminded them that everything in the movie was pretend, but I didn't mention anything about "not being afraid" because we didn't want them to think there was something to be afraid of. Did you follow that circular reasoning? ;)

Both of them slept well last night and got plenty of sleep but we'll see how they do today. It was a long day yesterday and that tends to mean we start the week off rough.

Oh, and it may be awhile before I post more pictures. Our camera's been having issues for several weeks and we're returning it this week and hopefully getting a new one.