Scaricature

No, I did not misspell 'caricature' - the S is important.  During our day at the Wild Animal Park we passed a caricature artist and Daddy thought it would be fun to have one drawn of Emily.  So, we positioned her just right, for perfect viewing, and he set to work.  

First, he had to get a good look at her and prep his pens.

Since there was little chance she was just going to smile at him and hold it for an extended time he asked for a picture of her smile.  I showed him this.
Soon he got started.  At this point it was fairly innocuous...
and pretty soon Emily was interested in seeing her drawing.  

There was some discussion of hanging it in her room since she is "riding" a giraffe but I didn't love the idea because I didn't think it looked like her.  We were very hopeful that when he added teeth it would look more like her and not just a blonde, blue eyed, pig-tailed girl.  SOMETHING to say "EMILY!"

By this time she was smiling at him and I was showing him the picture - hoping he would get it right and bring it all together - but with every stroke it was getting worse!!!  A woman passing by actually commented (loudly) that it looked nothing like her and we all tried to keep in our laughter and think about how we could possibly fix it.  Oh dear dear me... the poor guy actually asked us if he could black out all of the teeth or go down to just the front two (obviously he knew it was BAD).

When it was all over I made him take a picture with her and his drawing so I will never forget his face and all of you can avoid him at the park (he was nice though).

Tell me, does this...
look anything like her?
It will not be hanging in her room.  We try to AVOID nightmares around here.

A Wild Time

The morning of July 21st Emily was found reading up on her adventure for the day...

and she was pretty excited!
Once we arrived...
we had loads of fun and saw a lot of animals.
As soon as we got in we walked all of the way to the back of the park...
for the Journey Into Africa tram ride.


The lions put on a really great show for all of us complete with loud roars and some fighting.
I think everyone's favorite though was this 2 day old rhinoceros.  
We were not allowed to stop the tram and upset the mama but as we slowly rolled by she came right out...
and made him follow her back to where she felt he was safer.




After the ride we were off to explore the rest of the park - feeding the lorikeets, 





and ducks,
and watching a few shows.





Emily spent a lot of the show behind me - protecting herself from the animals on stage...
but did let Daddy take her up close after it was over.



We also saw a lot of eating.  First was the elephant rush when they sprinkle food all around and let the elephants all out at once.  Then the elephant caretaker came and spoke to us, telling us all about the elephants at the Wild Animal Park.




The cheetah caretaker also came out to speak while the two cheetahs gnawed on some meaty bones.

Here is everyone checking out a hair from an elephant's tail... it is like plastic... crazy.
And we ended our day with a little exercise...




and dreams of going back.