Dancin' Queen and Peacocks

This title has you intrigued, doesn't it?  Last Friday, my husband and I raced home from work to take our son to the St. Louis Zoo (one of our favorite places, especially now that we have a toddler) for the Friday night "Jungle Boogie."  For those of you not in the know, it's basically a chance to walk around the zoo later than usual and listen to a live band.  The weather was hot, but with a breeze, it was bearable.

You would think the highlight of the evening would have been our little animal-lover getting to touch the stingrays in Caribbean Cove.  You would be wrong.  $8 later, he spent five minutes splashing his hand around the water before giving us the baby sign for "all done" and running for the exit.  Or you might think it was having the Butterfly Room all to ourselves.  Except that the reason we were all alone in the exhibit was because we didn't know what apparently everyone else in the Zoo did--that the butterflies were all "asleep" except the one or two Monarch-looking types that were sort of bobbing around.  I couldn't blame him for being skeptical about the wonders of the butterflies that time around.

The highlight of the night came as we were eating the deep-fried, over-priced zoo food (or I should say, as my husband and I were sharing the kids' meal corndog that our son refused to finish).  The area directly around the live band was packed solid, so we settled for a set of tables just within hearing range by the sea lion exhibit.  No one else was sitting there, probably because you couldn't see the band and could barely hear them, but with a toddler, sometimes isolation and seclusion is better.  Even though our son could barely hear the music, as soon as the band's rendition of "Dancing Queen" came on, he threw down his half-eaten corndog and swayed out to the middle of the empty tables around us and began to dance.  His dancing is a series of sways and dips, but hey--for an 18 month old, he's got moves.  And in true toddler fashion, he realized that I was filming him with my IPhone, so he turned around and cheesed for the camera a bit.  Sounds cute, right?  Judge for yourself:

 

The second highlight of the night followed the dancing.  As my full attention was paid to my 'lil dancer, my husband whispered to me, "Amy--don't move," which, by the way, is a horrible thing to say to someone without explaining further.  One of the zoo's resident peacocks with an appetite for deep-fried, over-priced zoo food had come up behind our table and was sitting underneath my chair!  It was a miracle that I didn't freak out and had the sense of mind to pick up the half-eaten corndog and leftover fries.  I threw pieces of them down away from my chair, and she gulped them up in seconds.  Once the threat of being pecked by a peacock had passed, it was kind of awesome to be that close to a peacock.  Once we finished tossing her the deep-fried, over-priced zoo food leftovers, we moved onto my son's goldfish crackers.  He even got to toss a few goldfish to the peacock.

So, the moral of the story is never underestimate how "up close and personal" things can get at the zoo, and always bring plenty of extra goldfish crackers.