Happy anniversary, have a snake! – Hive and Nest

Oh my gosh, I just realized that today–yes today–is my one year anniversary of blogging!  Haven’t my faithful readers, all five of you, learned a lot of silly, unimportant things about me? Mostly that I love sweets and hate doing anything hard, especially the laundry.  Or any household chores for that matter.  And that I’m a super good wife and mother who spends all day overseeing her children’s many enriching activities.

As my anniversary gift to you, I’m giving you a picture of me with my ugly haircut, which I swore I woudn’t do.  I have sunglasses on my head, so my hair doesn’t appear quite as lifeless and boring as it normally is.

I finally got enough gumption to do something entertaining with my kids for spring break. We made the one hour pilgrimage to The Snake Farm. (If you don’t like driving, don’t move to Texas. They have everything in this state, but it’s the size of France, so most likely you will have to drive an hour or two–at least–to see what you want to see.)

The Snake Farm is a very old-fashioned reptile house/zoo. Mostly it’s a large room filled with aquariums that have snakes and other critters inside. If you have sons you are most likely well-versed in snake info. Which snake is the most poisonous (Tai pan*), largest (Reticulated Python), fastest learner (Cobras. Who knew?). So a chance to see a lot of these snakes up close was a very big deal for the boy-folk in my family. Plus snakes are just cool.

The rest of the Snake Farm is a zoo. It’s my favorite kind of zoo–low budget. No fancy habitats, unless you consider a chain-link cage with some old logs inside fancy. The zebra exhibit, for example, was also the gazelles-with-weird-horns exhibit. It was also the shetland pony and longhorn cattle exhibit as well. Talk about killing a lot of birds with one stone! 

There were a bunch of random monkey cages as well as some lemur exhibits containing lemurs that were not happy to be there. Have you ever heard a lemur scream? It’s very loud and very horrifying.

No old-school animal attraction would be complete without a petting zoo.  Instead of a bunch of greedy, brazen goats, which is what most petting zoos consist of, this one was full of pigs and poultry.  Which makes it more of a petting farm than a zoo, but I digress.  Due to the fact that we used to have chickens, my kids are quite expert at catching them; much to the envy of the poor city kids who could only look on jealously.

India was determined to catch this duck with a fro.

York let the chicken and llama have a moment to make out.  Get a room, you two! Everyone loved the pigs.  Especially Jasper.  Ada doesn’t appear to have a fondness for animals.  She kept asking if she could go sit in the car instead.

We were in and out in less than two hours (including the black hole known as the gift shop).  The temperature was a lovely 73º, and the place was so small I didn’t need to bring my stroller.  So I actually enjoyed myself. Who knows, we might actually have a few more field trips before my children leave for college! (if you want to hear about a bad zoo experience, my sister also went to the zoo yesterday (but in Salt Lake).  You can red about it here. Isn’t that weird that we both were on the same zoo wavelength?

*When I asked York the answer to this question, he replied, “well, that’s a hard question to answer.  The Tai-Pan has the deadliest venom.  But the Black Mamba has venom that’s almost as deadly and it’s also the most aggressive.  So really a Black Mamba is the most dangerous snake.” Thank you, Jeff Corwin.