day two: central park, the zoo, and alyson's new boyfriend

so day two with my chicago family was busy busy busy. we decided it was the day to hit the central park zoo. there are three main zoos in new york: central park, prospect park, and the bronx zoo. now the bronx zoo sounds like a doozy, but it is very far away- like maybe two hours on the train and none of us was up for that. prospect park zoo sounded nice but is mostly like frogs and small animals. so we settled on the nice middle ground: central park zoo. we wanted to show alyson, nicole and rowan the park anyways, its near a few shops that alyson wanted to stop by AND it has the gay penguin daddies (from teh book "and tango makes three"). i mean really, what more can you ask for?

so the plan was to pack lunches (so economical) and then eat lunch and hit the zoo. what really happened is that rowan fell fast asleep on the train ride to the zoo:



so instead of going right to the zoo, we shopped around a bit while she slept and then we ate our lunches, just the four of us. jes and i had fake turkey sandwiches with hummus and tomato. aly and nik made ham sammies on this bread that they FELL IN LOVE WITH. it was called something like "super wheat extreme" bread or something like that. all they talked about the whole time they were here was how deliciously soft this bread is. i tasted it, its pretty good. here they are admiring their delish sammies:



after we all finished our lunches which included brownies for dizzert (so good), AND after twelve million kindergarteners LEFT the zoo, we headed in. apparently there is a big zoo and then the children's zoo. $8 for each adult got us into both. at the big zoo we saw seals, monkeys, snakes, penguins, and all kinds of crazy rainforest animals. i liked the bright orange birds and the weird mooserats (they reminded me of our cats larry & emily). rowan began waking up around the seals but it took her until the penguins to wake up fully. in the children's zoo we saw red pandas (not really, but there was an area for them), polar bears, and some farm animals. here are some pics of all the animals we saw:









yes that is right folks, along with the lions, tigers and bears, we saw mr. colin farrell, with his son and his group of folks. it went down like this- true story: i am sitting on some ledge while nicole and ro are looking at the gay penguins. alyson RUSHES up to me and i am all "what the f?" she whispers in my ear "colin farrell is in here. seriously. go see. i give you permission to leave the penguin house." so i grab my trusty sidekick jes and we head out. i was CERTAIN that alyson was wrong. let's just say she is a bit lacking in the pop culture knowledge area (not as bad as nicole, but that is another story). anywho i was sure it was some brooklyn guy or some high school guy who WISHES he was colin farrell. buy sure as shit, i get up to the guy and there he is, none other than colin farrell. and what is totally nuts is we kept seeing him all over the zoo. you know why? b/c i think he is secretly in love with alyson. instead of US following HIM, i think HE was following ALYSON. you know he is irish and all, so he must have a thing for the readheads. when we got home later that night we showed aly and nik his sex tape. aly and i think his dick is big. jes thinks its small. who knows.

after our exciting celeb citing, we continued on through the park chatting and not stepping on cracks until we got to the carousel. rowan LOVED it. she went on a horse all by herself and smiled the whole time (especially when we yelled "great job dora!). i felt (and jes agreed) that is was going faster than normal, but ro seemed unphased by the speed. here is a cutey mc cutey pic of her:



as the sun went down, we headed toward benny's burritos for dinner. as per usual, it was DELISH. alyson got some meat platter thing that she shared with ro, and nik shared her chicken something with ro as well. jes and i rocked the soft tacos again. and this time we got a small margarita instead of a grande. this was the right choice. we got home, they bathed the girl and we were all in the bed by midnight. being a parent is exhausting yall.

p.s. sometimes i hate blogger b/c it won't let me upload the photos.