Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Sloth Bear Tour at the National Zoo

Over the summer, Ed and I attended one of the National Zoo's after-hours fundraisers, Zoofari. Typically, I do not support over-eating in any way, but this event is loaded with excellent food, and I love it. In fact, every year I try and recruit more friends to attend because it is really that fun.

I quite possibly owe my sanity to the National Zoo, because that's where Ed and Connor would head bright and early the Winter after Helen was born so I could snooze at home with Helen - the super sleeper. And because of that, we've been members of the zoo for several years and attend one or two fundraisers a year for the place.

Before we started attending this annual event with friends, they went without us and won a "backstage visit" with the sloth bears one year at the silent auction. They generously took us as their guests, and we had a ball. This was about a month before Helen was born. This year, while attending the event, we formed a bidding pact and first bid on a backstage tour of the panda bears, but got outbid. So one of my friends ran to the tent with the sloth bear backstage visit and placed a winning bid for our team.

After several scheduling issues, we were finally all able to make it to the zoo this past Sunday. Only the keeper failed to show. But my friend is nothing, if not persistent, so we got our promised visit. And, because the zoo folks felt bad about our tour being delayed, they threw in a backstage visit with the otters. BONUS!

We all had a blast. Note that both Helen and Connor loved feeding mealy worms to the sloth bear, even going so far as to pick up any worms that fell to the ground so they could feed them to the bear. No squeamishness here, friends.

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