The kids started back to school today without a hitch. Unless you want to count the fact that they couldn’t sleep last night and got up at omgwtf o’clock this morning, then sat around bored when there was nothing to do since we packed their lunches and had everything organized and ready to go last night. Or that I had to inspect Cody’s backup repeatedly to confiscate the items he kept trying to smuggle to school: cars, radio, stuffed animals.

Once everyone left I turned around, looked at my empty and quiet house and said “hm”. I’ve been saying “hm” all morning. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s too quiet? Maybe because I’m not sure what to do even though there’s a billion and one things to do around here? Or because I missed my kids 3 seconds after they got on the bus? Housework was boring so I played with my new flickr account instead. I wanted to upload some pictures of our awesome trip to the Oregon Zoo yesterday! I also added the Flickr badge to the side bar so there will be random pictures there as well.

As for our labor day, it was perfect. The idea was to wear out the kids at the zoo so they’d be good and tired last night. (It didn’t work. We wore them out too much and they power napped in the car on the way home.) We got up early and were out the door by nine AM (small miracle!). We swung by Kevin’s girlfriend’s house and made it to the zoo pretty early. I wanted to get there early so we could actually see some animals awake. But the darn kitties were already sleeping. (Cougars, cheetah, tiger, etc..) I also wanted to do stuff differently. There is so much to see and do at the Oregon Zoo and we usually just try to see every animal.. but you end up getting tired and scraping it thinking next time you’ll catch up on what you missed. We never seem to get to the “catch up” part so we went straight for that first instead. Of course we had to stop by the elephants and we got there at a good time. There were trainers there having them to do tricks for us! That was a treat.

We stopped by the Winged Wonders exhibit (butterflies) and I got some really awesome pictures. We rode the zoo train and got off at the halfway point and walked down to the Rose Gardens where I got some more great pictures. I uploaded a small sample of the pictures I took on Flickr.

Cody cracked us up throughout the day on this trip. He left the house wearing goggles (in case of an alien invasion), a keyring of bubble wands (but no bubbles), and his little pocket-size FM radio. At the Rose Garden he found a cheap felt cowboy hat. No one around claimed it so he wore that the rest of the day. There’s a picture of that too. What a funny little guy!

We had an awesome day. The weather was perfect, we tired ourselves out. It was a good last day of summer.

Edit: I changed the title of this post to fit more.