A day at the Wild Animal Park

We headed out early Saturday morning to go to the San Diego Wild Animal Park (aka: Safari Park). We had a great time and fun day!

First stop was the carousel - of course!

Sakura loves carousels - I headed straight for the giraffe, cause I love giraffes -

unfortunately I didn't realize the dumb giraffe was stationary.

Baby anything is always cute, these babies were especially cute!


Our very own little butterfly

In flight

We had two favorite things at the zoo this time, the lorakeets were SO cool, as you'll see below we bought some nectar to feed them and Daddy was lucky enough to get a taker on his food. Sakura was unsure of this flying thing on her Daddy, but she never cried and just starred at him.

Feeding the lorakeet

Not too sure

Sakura was checking out the birds here

We looked around the gift shop a bit and saw these cute butterfly wings.

Sakura is modeling them here for us.

And the back...

Sakura insisted that she wear her backpack once she noticed we had it (I just stuck a couple of diapers and some snacks in it before we headed into the park), so she walked all over the place (and it was HOT outside) with her backpack on. Silly kid!

Pretty bird of paradise at the park

the Zoo and the Wild Animal Park have the prettiest flowers

Our second trip on the carousel

The tie for our favorite was the Butterfly Exhibit. It's a limited time for this exhibit and boy am I glad we got to see it. The butterflies were beautiful and they were EVERYWHERE! Omgosh sooo many butterflies flying around, landing, drinking, just gorgeous!

Sakura wanted to catch one ...

So she tried and tried....

Then she saw this little girl with one, and since she apparently caught it like this,

Sakura tried this way too.

Beautiful butterflies

Daddy has a new friend....a butterfly liked Daddy and of course Sakura wanted to touch him

(she didn't by the way)

As you can tell, I loved the butterfly exhibit!
Um....I didn't take many pictures of anything else ;)

Sakura was pretty funny, she was SO good - she slept maybe 30 minutes on our drive there, so when we got to the park, it was pretty much nap time, but Sakura stayed awake - we did a few things, ate lunch, then the butterflies, then some shops, etc... well at lunch she was feeling a bit grumpy I think - so every question I asked her, she responded NO. Daddy threw in a question - Do you want ice cream? Sakura is no dummy, she said "Yes"... so we finished lunch and figured we'd head to the butterfly exhibit (the tickets were timed), and then find some ice cream somewhere cool .... so as we were walking, Sakura was pretending she was eating an ice cream cone - holding it in her hand just as you would, and licking away. Daddy and I got a good laugh.

Soon it was time to head home - we stopped at the mall first - Sakura did great there too - well a few meltdowns but all in all, she was great. But as soon as we got in the car leaving the mall, someone was OUT cold! Poor Sakura was exhausted. We still had stops to make - Marukai, Mitsuwa Marketplace (grocery shopping for Bachan and Jiichan), and then home....Sakura slept through all of the stops and woke up about 20 minutes before we got home - PERFECT day!