What A Zoo...And All Things Fun!

What a great weekend!

Many of you know I mentioned we were going to be celebrating Natalia's 2 1/2 birthday this past Sunday in light of the busyness we're expecting this Christmas...and it may just become a permanent tradition. How fun it was to see her truly enjoying the spotlight and delighting in having her cousins and family around to celebrate her special day. (Her real 1/2 birthday would have been June 28th, but that was the middle of the week.) It of course was a miniature zoo inside the house as the kids and adults were all in a festive frame of mind! :-)

This weekend she learned how to sing the birthday song and of course likes to sing it over and over for everyone she knows: especially her cousins, friends and family members. I also tried to teach her, as much as I could remember, the Polish version, "Sto Lat". Pete helped to fill the gaps in my memory...she now can sing each version equally well. So cute!

Here she is in her "Sunday's finest", a gift from her Babcia. I thought it looked "July 4th-ish".

And here is the promised picture of the ladybug cupcakes from her party.

If you're interested in what I thought was an easy design, I made chocolate cupcakes, spread a thin layer of chocolate frosting on top, then cut 2 half circles from a strawberry Fruit Roll-Up and overlapped one end to form the wings. I then used an upside-down Rollo candy for the head and piped a face with white frosting and spots with the remaining chocolate frosting. They were no sweeter than your average store-bought cupcakes since I was careful to be minimal with the frosting. What's nice is that the Roll-Up "softened" and didn't pull off in one big piece when eaten, because they were mostly kept at room temperature prior to serving. (And, I despise few things as much as heavily colored icing to the point it tastes bitter...thus my bright red icing dilemma was solved!)

Pete remarked that it was a bit scary having them all smiling at him like that! LOL

Later that evening we pulled out the sprinkler and some plastic for the kids. We all had some laughs watching their fun.



Finally, early Monday morning we headed for D.C. and Ryan and Sarah drove down from Philly to meet us at the Metro station. Since the Washington Zoo is free, we decided to stay for the day and find some dinner nearby before making the drive back home. We used the Twinbrook station off of the red line and found a great place to eat just off of the Bethesda stop. (The Zoo was off of Cleveland Park).

Here are a few pictures from the day.




All in all, the zoo in D.C. was comparable to the Philly and Maryland Zoos, but it was fun exploring another part of D.C. and the Metrorail made our trip pretty inexpensive considering what we would have paid at the other zoos. Thankfully we hit NO TRAFFIC either way, and it only took us just over 2 hours to drive from our place! Not bad.

I love organizing things like this! Planning trips and events tends to energize me, especially if I have time to work at it ahead of time. My family jokes that I'm their representative booking agent. That's a kind way of saying I'm detail oriented...just a bit Type A! LOL