petting zoo: part 1

Will has been really into animals lately. These days he gets a lot of excitement from trips to the pet store to see the animals there, watching the fish in the tank at the library, seeing a doggie or a kitty or ducks when we go on walks. He always prefers to read books about animals (Touch-and-Feel Farm, Barnyard Dance, Muddy Hippo) and to wear clothes with animals on them. Also he can tell us the sounds that all kinds of animals make, and his lion roar is especially impressive lately.

We've been taking him to the Madison Zoo almost every time we visit there, but I think he has been too young to really fully appreciate those trips - I'll be really looking forward to the next time we take him. In the meantime, there are a few other zoos we have been planning to take him to - there's a good one in Detroit, and another in Toledo - but especially, we've been meaning to take Will to the local petting zoo at Domino's Farms in Ann Arbor. There aren't a lot of animals there, mostly farm animals, but you can get up very close to them and pet/feed a lot of them. so we finally did it over Memorial Day weekend.

There are a lot of great pictures of this trip, so I'm splitting it up into two blog posts. Click here for part 2.

We started off in the barn, where they had mostly goats and some piggies. We got Will some carrot slices to feed to the animals. But we (and he) didn't realize that almost all the animals, even the babies, were bigger than him. So he was a bit apprehensive, and we had to help him be brave enough to get close enough to feed them.

One little goat got out of his pen, and Will got a little too scared when we tried to feed him.

He much preferred to interact with the different birds that were there, I guess they were less threatening than the baby goat. Here he's checking out the chicken coop - where there's also a peacock which he thought was amazing.

The ducks were probably Will's favorite. He has just recently learned the sound ducks make ("cuck, cuck"), and sometimes he feeds the ducks with Ambrose in the stream behind our houses. So he wasn't very afraid of them and had a great time chasing them around.