The Zoo Animals

Today, on an adventure at Marshall's (isn't it always an adventure?), Harris and I picked up a pack of safari animals for Owen. I thought this would be a nice touch to the safari playroom I'm setting up right now (more to come on that when it's fininshed). I knew that Owen has always loved animals, but I had NO IDEA how attached he would become to these animals. He's had them for all of 2 1/2 hours and I have a feeling that they will be part of our family for a while. Included in this package of rubbery kind-of animals is a giraffe, elephant, cheetah, warthog (nice, huh?), hippo and a lion. (I'm listing these so I can remember what is missing at a later date.)

Owen wasn't too sure what the warthog was in the beginning, but he figured it out. When Jason told him he had to share one animal with Harris, though, he immediately tossed the warthog his way. "Here doe, Ha-wis"... as in... you can have the crummy one.

Then, I needed to go make dinner downstairs and asked him if he wanted to watch Diego downstairs. He Lurrrves Diego (who else talks to animals, right?) and he hesitated and said he wanted to stay upstairs. I told him Harris and I were going downstairs, then. Well, about 2 minutes later, he came down holding ALL the animals as best he could and asked if he could watch Diego with his animals. See how he has lined them all up to also watch "tee-bee"?

It was time for dinner after Diego and Owen was getting tired of transporting them from room to room by hand, so he came up with a better idea:

Needless to say, the animals ate dinner with us. They also marched around the rug beside Owen's chair at the dinner table (when they were supposed to be eating dinner), played ring around the rosies, came back upstairs to the new playroom after dinner and it was a little sad telling them goodnight. I'm sure we'll see them first thing in the morning.