A Winter Wonderland...In July

While Jeff attended his last full weekend of grad school (woohoo!) I decided to take the kids out for some fun. Our local zoo was having a winter in July party and they created 40 tons of snow for the event. So the kids and I headed over there to see the animals and enjoy some cool snow on a hot July day! It turned out to be a terrific day. We ran into several of our friends and the kids had a blast. Upon our arrival, we saw a koala:

Okay, so that's not a real koala but we did visit the newest addition to the zoo, Oz the Koala. After checking out a few of the animals, we headed over to the snow zone. Of course Daniel was a bit hesitant but Allison dove right in:
And even made it to the top of the icy snow in her flip flops!
Coming down the hill was a little more difficult, but Allison enjoyed every moment of it!
Then the kids were ready for a snowball fight:
And Allison got to meet the Snow princess:
By this time, Daniel had built up enough courage to climb the snow:
I know, the snow probably doesn't look like much to you northerners but when you live in Florida, you take what you can get. Just glad I don't have to drive in it anymore!

Look who else we ran into:
More fun in the snow:
I guess the snow wasn't enough to cool the kids off because afterward they wanted to go play in the fountains:
Then we were off to see the rest of the zoo and some animals. The neat part was that the zoo staff had put snow in with some of the animals and they seemed to love it. Here's the cheetah checking out the snow:
But our favorite was the brown bears and the sea otters, both of which were quite active despite the heat. I managed to get a great video of the bears playing (you'll have to excuse Allison's commentary towards the end of the video):



And the sea otters eating:



And here's a few more pictures from our fun day at the the zoo: