An Old Favorite

In the last little bit, Kevin and I have realized that as our youngest child, there are a lot of things we haven’t done with Malia. Activities, outings, disciplinary tactics, etc. that were commonplace when the boys were all young were left by the wayside as they grew up. As the youngest by a pretty big span (there are nearly eleven years between Daniel and Malia), Malia has missed out in some ways due to that mental “moving on to a new stage.” Once we made that realization, Kev and I have been working to fill in some of those gaps.

When the boys were young, the zoo was one of our favorite places for an outing. Malia has been to the zoo on multiple occasions, but it has been a while, two and a half years in fact. I like to blame a pandemic for part of that, but the other part was the waning interest of the boys. When family outings occur, Malia has gotten outnumbered, and we have ended up going other places. The last time she got voted down we ended up in a trilobite quarry, which she enjoyed, but she was really sad about not getting to go to the zoo. Knowing Malia didn’t have school today, I put a trip to the zoo on the calendar. Matthew still had school and Kev had work, so it was a girls’ day out.

Going to the zoo with a ten-year-old Malia was calmer than our trips were of old. I didn’t have to run to keep up with a pack of little ones with miniscule attention spans, tell anyone to stay with the group, or prevent anyone from climbing into the bear habit. We shunned our traditional route through the zoo and wandered wherever Malia’s interest took us. We saw all the animals, but we did it in a different order. She still got to ride the carousel, which she has always loved. We saw the rhinos closer than we ever have in all our myriad of previous visits. We also caught a glimpse of a one-month-old Colombus monkey and got to see another young monkey lose its balance and fall off a branch which was super cute. We wandered past the sea lions just at training time. As we’ve discovered in the past, the animals are more active in the cooler weather than in the heat of the summer which made for a fun morning.

Taking a step back to have these adventures with Malia is good for her, but it’s also good for me. Sometimes I get too caught up in the whirlwind that is life and taking time to smell the roses (or the rhinos, which is not nearly as pleasant from an olfactory standpoint) is a blessing. Having adult children comes with its own set of challenges and being able to take a morning returning to an old favorite gave me a much-needed bit of calm. Malia loved it too. And we got to stop at Crown Burger for lunch on the way home which we could never do when Matthew was with us.

I think we had better plan more of these outings because as I well know, before long she’ll be too old to spend a morning with her mom talking to the animals.