Duck love

So we are breaking the laws and playing hooky for a few days here in Florida. Of course we needed to celebrate Ben's birthday a few days early! He only wanted a CHOCOLATE cake and we forgot to special order one from the super awesome bakery at Publix, so we ended up with this German bunt cake which was basically a chocolate donut on steroids - YUM!!! Abuelita only had 6 candles so we made a 7 with Kat Kats - the almost 7 year old LOVED it!! Happy little man. (How do I have an almost 7 year old???? Emma is allowed to grow, Ben is not.)

Every morning the ducks are squawking when they see movement inside the house. The kids give Abuelita a break and happily handle the feedings. It's snowing on LI, and snowing popcorn here. :)

Ben was excited to receive Master Wu's Dragon - 5 beautiful bags that he is actually milking instead of putting together in one session.

We, of course, spend at least an hour here daily - it's too cold for the community pool though, so we had sad kiddos for a few minutes...

Ben is "almost" there with the pump. Sheesh kid, you are ALMOST 7!

Emma got a 500 piece puzzle for Christmas that I thought she would love. Turns out this puzzle is a b*tch - that's right, I said it. It took me and Abuelita 3 hours just to get the outside edges completed! We leave tomorrow so I taped the underside in chunks so we can redo when we return home.

The Miami Zoo was on today's menu and it was AWESOME. It reminded me lots of the LA Zoo where we used to go weekly with our pals when the Bunch were babes. We do LOVE the Bronx Zoo, we just HATE the traffic getting there so haven't been in a few years... We are going to have to change that this Summer. It truly was the perfect relaxing day. According to my fitness app, we walked 5.05 miles (10,678 paces). Good times! And they got to surf on Crocodiles...

Fall in love with giraffes all over again...

Learn about 100s of endangered species - Ben kept exclaiming at the top of his lungs every time he read a sign, "This animal is endangered!!!"

Lots of "photo moments" but this one was the silliest placement of the "face". The elephants bung hole!!  Hahahaha, yes, I said bung hole, too! Dang, hope I'm not offending too many people. Aww, shucks, who am I kidding - only 5 people read this and they are all fun loving folk!

We got up close and personal with so many great animals.  Great job, Miami Zoo. We look forward to returning to you sometime in the future.