Mom's birthday celebration with the critters!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mom's birthday was a party for everyone!  On Saturday, we drove down to meet her, dad, and Kenneth at Seaquest State Park in Castle Rock, WA. near the base of Mt. St. Helens (which I never did see) for a picnic.  Little did she know, Julie and Terry were coming too!  Mom is usually the one knowing everything and planning everything in the family, including her own birthday, as I'm sure it is with most families.  So this year we wanted to have at least some of it be a surprise and try to be the organizers.  So we didn't let her bring anything to the picnic, but instead we all contributed our various parts.  Dad brought the peach ice tea, Julie brought the hoggie buns, meat, cheese, and condiments, Kenneth brought the veggies for the hoggies and some fruit, and Terry made some potato salad.  After volunteering at the Garage of Blessing all day Friday, I came home and whipped up some enchiladas and Mexican rice for youth group dinner, cleaned the house, and had a crisis with the lemon and poppy seed cookies.  I totally forgot you have to soak the almonds for the cookies 24-48 hours, so by Friday afternoon I definitely didn't have time for a 24 soak plus 3-4 hours in the dehydrator.  So I sent out a frantic facebook inquiry, did some unsuccessful googling, and finally decided to try to substitute almond butter for almonds.  The first batch of dough came out way gooier/pastier/stickier  than normal, but I threw them in the dehydrator anyway and went off to youth group.  Came home from youth group and checked on the cookies.  Still gooey, so I left them in and threw in the second bath of dough.  Much runnier than the first batch, but what can you do.  I then moved on to the cauliflower couscous, the Mexican salad, and the Knock you Naked Brownies.  After tasting them, Kenneth said the name was appropriate in that you have to unbutton your pants to eat them they're so good and rich.  Don't worry though, we all kept our clothes on.  After all that, we collapsed into bed and left bright and early the next morning at nine for the picnic. 

 
We arrived at the park within minutes of each other, and soon enjoyed a delicious, albeit chilly, picnic.  After that, it was time to warm up and burn off some of those brownies, so off we went on a stroll.  Due to the inaccurate scale of the trail map, we ended up out a bit longer than planned, maybe an hour to an hour and a half, but there was lovely flora and fauna  and fungi to enjoy.  Gromit was happy because due to the chilliness, there were very few other picnickers there, so he was able to enjoy a mostly off leash hike, and burned off lots of energy running back and forth between the different paces between were keeping. 

The next day it was up bright and early for a day of meeting creatures!  As a birthday activity, we had booked a tour at the Zoological Conservation Center & Sloth Captive Husbandry Research Center.  A lady opened in last December, as a place to rescue critically endangered species, as well as provide education about other more common species.   It was awesome!  We were first greeted by a plethora of semi normal animals: 1 old great Dane, a random assortment of chickens, 1 chick, geese, goats, sheep, and several other misc. dogs and cats.  After our safety talk, it was time for the fun to begin! 

 

We started in the kangaroo pen (the goats, sheep, and dogs came with us everywhere we went).  We saw a joey kangaroo who was super soft and gentle and friendly, as well as several wallabies, including one albino.  We fed them all Kashi bars and soon made friends :)  Next was the sloths!  This was the founder's passion, she has about 350 sloths! That's a lot of sloth.  They were fun to feed.  We felt bad waking them up, since they're nocturnal, but they were happy to receive their apple treats.  The babies we held were so sleepy they were eating with there eyes closed and then just snuggled in :) They're actually not that slow, just very deliberate and cautious with their movement since their eyesight is so bad. 



 

After the deliberate sloths were one of my personal favorites, lemurs!!  They were so awesome!  The ring-tailed were a little more spastic and easily startled, so we were instructed not to touch them, but just let them crawl all over us as we fed them fruit loops :)  But when their long fluffy soft tails accidentally brushed up against us, or their little paws came into our hands, we didn't turn them away by any means :)  After the ring tailed lemurs, we said hello to the black and white ruff lemurs, who were a little more willing to be petted.  We also said hello to Mr. and Mrs. porcupine, and one very excited monkey.  We then moved on to a very large, but also friendly fellow.  A wolf!  He was only 16 months old and still growing, but he dwarfed the
great dane!  (Although he still treated the dane as the alpha). 

Alejandro the wolf was pretty awesome.  He would play with the dane, but he also wanted to meet all of us.  If we were willing, she allow him to jump up on us and give us a big hug and kisses, and we weren't allowed to turn our faces away or we'd be rejecting him.  Who could reject that sweet puppy?? Not us.  We all got multiple hugs and kisses, and then he lay on the ground while we gave him a belly rub :)  On our way back towards the main house to wash up, we saw a miniature horse walk by, and I got head butted by a persistent goat named Napolean. 

Our next creature ambassador was Chalet the penguin.  She was the warm weather type like those I'd seen in South Africa.  She was a little hesitant to walk around and say hello to everyone, but eventually we all got a turn to hold her.  She made the funniest noises, some cooing ones and some more unusual names lending to her nickname (ie, think Donkey sounds). 

Our last stop for the day was the newly finished building where we met a variety of friendly fellows.  We held and passed around a blonde skunk and raccoon, rescued from fur farms.  The skunk was actually very sweet and mellow, except that he gave me a little nip on the chin.  The raccoon was hilarious!  They warned us about his fascination with people's mouths, but we didn't understand until we held him.  He really loved Kenneth and my mouth and wanted to check everything out, like a dentist.  Maybe it was our shiny retainers, but whatever the reason he was not easily satisfied.   He had his fingers and mouth all up in our face and was determined to know what we'd been munching on.   

We also met  two foxes, the fennic (the smallest in the world), and the pallid, an armadillo, and a Uromastyx lizard.  All in all it was a great day with over 30 species we got to interact with.   I think our favorites were the wolf and the lemurs.  We would definitely recommend this place to anyone in the area!  So between the animals, the picnic, hike, going to Cinnebarre to see Gravity, and having a lovely birthday dinner, it was a great weekend in Salem!  Happy birthday mom!