The day I had six kids at the zoo (hmm, that doesn't sound quite right . . . )

My wonderful friend Megan and her darling baby Johnathan are in town for a couple weeks, so we set up a little trip to the zoo last week. Another friend, Suzi (who also happens to be Meg's sister-in-law) and her super cute two-year-old daughter Melia joined us, as did my nieces and nephew. Melissa was in town to work on the house a bit, and I figured painting would be easier sans kids so I took them off her hands. It was definitely good practice to try to look after six kids; luckily it was only for a couple of hours and two of them were strapped in a double stroller for a majority of that time :).

Now onto the millions of pictures:

Megan and Johnathan and me and Clyde
Our first stop was the giraffes; here's Clyde with the little statue.

And here he is checking out the real ones!

The new African exhibit has all sorts of cool features, including this Jeep for kids to climb and play in.

Ah, the moments that moms live for: Clyde hopped out of the Jeep and (on his own, without any prompting) gave Will a huge hug. Love it.

Somehow we've never noticed it before, but there's a super cool elephant that squirts water; it was pretty hot that day so the kids LOVED it!

Nice and refreshed!

Of course we made a stop at the big giraffe slide. Clyde braved it alone . . .

as did George, but the rest of us doubled up.

Mallory took Lily down a couple times,

while Courtney helped out with her "new best friend" Melia,

and poor Will got stuck with me. I'm not a huge fan of slides, especially as an adult attempting slides made for children. I was apparently quite confused/worried/unexcited about going down.

We made a quick stop to climb on some of the animal statues: George is a monkey, of course!

Mallory and Lily opted to hang out with an elephant.

We tried to see the tigers, but like the lions they were taking a midday nap (we ran into a lot of this while we were there!)

So we posed on the little tiger cub instead! (Honestly, I don't know why the zoo even keeps any live animals; the good photo ops are all with fake ones!)

Clyde's favorite way of waking people up is roaring like a tiger :)

George and the tiger.

A very giggly Courtney :)

Mallory and the tiger.

I thought the babies in the nest would be cute, but they were less than cooperative. You'd think that they would be smiling since it was one of the few times I dared get them out of the stroller!

It was at around then that Meg, Johnathan, Suzi and Melia decided to wrap up their day at the zoo - completely understandable since it was getting really hot and Suzi's four months pregnant. I was a little nervous to see the adult-to-child ratio change from 3:8 to 1:6, but we did pretty well :)

The big kids got to ride the merry-go-round, here's Court.

And George!

Clyde and Mallory :)

We saved the penguin exhibit for last; the penguins sensed our need to actually see animals move around and they obliged by diving into the water and swimming around quite a bit.

Then Clyde and Will got up and close and personal with some of the penguins outside the exhibit, goofy kids!

And that was our Zoo Boise adventure! We all survived and had lots of fun, thanks to obedient kids, the double stroller, labeled water bottles, and plenty of fruit snacks and graham crackers.

And I'm now completely convinced of my ability to mother more than two kids at once - I can handle up to six! (Again, only for a two or three hour stretch!)