The Rain Forest comes to our town

(c) 2009 Ms. Huis Herself at musenmutter.blogspot.com

Pumpkin got to go to a special program at school today, put on by Understanding Wildlife, about the rain forest. I knew they were having it at school, but didn't mention it to her since I didn't know if the half-day classes like hers were going.

She came out the door at the end of her day calling to me, "Kinkajous, Mom! We got to see two, real, live kinkajous Their names were Jack and Jill and we got to see them!!!!" Definitely a hit.

They put on a program, which I think was pretty much identical to the in-school one, this evening, at a nearby elementary school. Pumpkin was so excited about it, they've got no school tomorrow, and Penguin had napped today, so we decided to go.

It was cool, but ran a little longer than we'd thought it would. I had guessed an hour, and it probably would have been, except that after 35 or 40 minutes they had an intermission... which lasted forever. That's because during the intermission, for five bucks, you could come up and get your picture taken holding the 15-foot long giant snake (um, an albino anaconda, I think?). So, of course, EVERYBODY practically did that. Plus, some of us (yes, us) also came home with new stuffed animals (monkeys, in our case) from their display. Then, finally, they did the second half, which was more like 25 minutes, and THEN you could line up to touch the small alligator on your way out. Which, of course, we also did.

It was cool. The first half was mostly birds - a scarlet macaw, a blue and gold macaw?, a cockatoo, a yellow-maned some-kind-of-parrot. They were all well-trained & the trainer had a very funny schtick, so it was amusing for the grown-ups, too. One talked, one flew in over the audience, one was trained to fly to an audience member who was holding up a dollar and retrieve it (and then return it), one nodded and shook his head - all very funny. Oh, plus the giant snake was shown... and even held by like 8 kids from the audience all together.

In the second half we saw two small alligators, a big one, a jungle cat-thing that looked sort of like a cheetah but smaller, the kinkajous, and a monkey. Obviously, most of those weren't as trainable/trained as the birds, but there was a funny bit with the monkey.

All in all, good fun, even though it ran later than we'd anticipated, and yeah, we did come home with two more stuffed animals, and a picture of Pumpkin and I holding a giant snake. Too bad it's not digital or I'd share it!