So what do you do on an 80 degree day in good old Baltimore....take the kids to the zoo of course! Have I mentioned before that we love the zoo?

A bunch of my girlfriends and I all met up and headed off for a fun filled morning and picnic lunch at the zoo. After we got all the kids strapped into their strollers, with a snack and their sippy cups we headed off. our group is so much fun because all of us are first time mom's, and we all have kids (two boys and two girls in the group) who are within 4 months of each other, which makes chatting about toddler issues (yes, we decided today that we no longer have babies we now have toddlers!) all that much more fun.

After a few laps around the otters, giraffes (yes, A was going nuts again), elephants, swamp lands (it probably has a nicer name, but trust me it is just a swamp area), and of course a stop to pet the goats, we settled by the giraffes for lunch. Each of us pulled out sandwiches for the kids, two turkey and cheese, one pb&j, and one just cheese, and we got chatting. As we talked we each ended up pulling out cheese, strawberries, puffs, veggie sticks, grapes, mash-ups, graham crackers, and mandarin oranges...naturally this brought us to our next topic...kids eating.  

Turns out none of our kids actually eats all that much for lunch. They all took a few bites of sandwich, then were off playing with the flowers and pulling up the grass. After several failed attempts at trying to shove a bit more sandwich down them, we gave up and moved on to fruit. After that lost its appeal also, we moved on to baby crack...aka pirates bootie...aka puffs. In addition to all of our kids not really being big into lunch, they all hate milk. We counted that they each probably only drink about 5-10oz of milk a day. Huh...who knew, A was not the only one who was not a milk fan!

About 30 minutes later, lunch was smeared all over the four kids, who by this point were sampling each other's food and sippy cups, while we tried to corral them on the picnic blankets; and we were cracking up over how stressed we all get over milk and food consumption. In the hopes of making life easier and less stressful (mainly for our husbands) we decided to no longer worry about how much our kid is eating or drinking as long as they are still smiling and being crazy. We also came up with a conclusion about parenting and how it becomes a bit more flexibly over time. So our conclusion is kid #1 gets the crazy stressed out parent who measures how much milk the kids drinks in a day and has about 15 different healthy choices for meals. Kid #2 gets the more mellow, in-the-know parent who is still able to provide healthy snacks and could care less how much the kids is drinking as long as it is milk and water. Then kid #3 comes along and is lucky to get fed in-between carpool, daycare, and errands, while their sippy cup is filled with toilet water because it was the only cold liquid in the house.

It is true...girlfriends really can figure anything out...although we all agreed next time it would need to be over a few glasses of wine!

xoxo

Daily Mom