I was gone most of last week and the start of this week, the wife and I went out of town with our daughter to visit family in Madison, WI.
Last Sunday we went out tothe Henry Vilas Zoo (it's a small free zoo in Madison) and I'm so mad we forgot our camera. My daughter is 17 months old and she loves watching animals on TV programs and such and she's got a few Baby Einstein DVDs she loves to watch...
Well, she got to have her first up close experience to seeing a tiger. The tiger paces along the 20some foot long window in it's cage and the the glass is about 2inches thick. People stand there and get to watch tiger up close and personal. So I stood her on the little ledge by the window and she was looking around and all of a sudden this large cat comes walking into her field of vision - her eyes got large and she smiled and pointed up at the tiger and was saying "kitty". She stood there in awe and watched for about 5 minutes.
She's very smart for her age. I took her into the reptile house (wife is deathly scared of snakes) and while inside she picked up on the word "snake", she's point them out in their enclosure and then above the enclosure are pictures of the reptiles and she'd point out the one she saw in the cage.
It was fun.
This Sunday coming up, Aion starts! Yeah! I've been itching for the game to finally get going - I was growing tired of playing around in the betas due to the fact that your character gets wiped when the betas ended. Now I can finally play the game without fear of this happening.
Hopefully things run smooth.
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Sounds like it was an incredible day... Too bad you have forgotten your camera, if not, I would imagined you taking loads and loads of picture for your family album.
The zoo changed a lot from when I was last at it years ago. Some of the animal enclosures are a little small, but it's a nice change of pace seeing some of the animals up close - for example the tiger exhibit at the MN Zoo is so large, it's almost impossible to spot the two tigers they have there.
She was spotting snakes, frogs and lizards in the enclosures that were hard to see and pointing them out to me and my younger brother and his girlfriend that was with. She'd then point to the picture above the enclosure. She's very smart. She's formed small sentences like "I see the [insert word here]" (dog, kitty, book, frog, piggy, etc). She also says "I hear the dog" and "dog says woof". There are a few other small sentences, but she doesn't say them very often and I can't remember what they are. She' probably got a 50-60 word vocabulary right now. She also just talks non-stop. I can't understand half of what she's saying, but it makes sense to her.
I'll bet she is eager to learn as well.
I used to go to the Dells every summer when I was little and I lived in the Madison area. I grew tired of it, but it is a fun place to visit just as long as you don't go there too often.
I'm amazed she can express what she see in words at her age.
I also think if children are surrounded by many animals, I think they would develope less fears about them.If your daughter likes tigers... does she like Tigger and Winnie the Pooh?
The daycare lady that watches my daughter has some Winnie the Pooh books with the characters in it, but neither she nor the wife and I have ever cared much for Winnie and the gang.
She loves her dogs at home though, we've got two huskies and the male is named Cody. Since about 9 months old she's been saying "Cogy" and for the life of us we couldn't figure out what she was talking about. About 3 weeks ago I asked her where her puppies where and she looked over at Cody, pointed and said "Cogy". So for nearly 7 months she's been calling his name (or so she thinks) by saying "Cogy".
She loves animals, especially the stuffed pig toy the dogs play with. She picks it up and carries it around while pointing to it and saying "piggy".
iowastate