Carrie Spritzer – Page 45 – The Creative Salad

Outdoor Moments

Any time there is a break in the rain, we slather on sunscreen and rush outside to enjoy the beautiful weather.

Spring has sprung! We have walks to take and gardening to do!

Last week I found another Melissa & Doug Wooden Cutting Fruit Crate at our local thrift store for … drum roll, please… 4 dollars! (instead of $20) As far as we are concerned there is no such thing as too much play food for when friends come over.

San Diego Postcards

We had a wonderful time.

San Diego Zoo

We are back from our trip to San Diego. Neither David, Miss Leyba nor I had visited San Diego before and we all enjoyed our trip immensely.

One of the main highlights? Four days spent at the San Diego Zoo.

This was my favorite moment from our zoo excursions:

Video: Play time at the zoo from Carrie on Vimeo.

Meet Tutapenda, a two year old Bonobo (more here) who lives at the zoo and is just three months older than Miss Leyba.

Miss Leyba and Tutapenda played like this for about 20 minutes. Benobos are among the most endangered of the primates and I believe that this experience was a once in a lifetime opportunity! It certainly was one of the most remarkable events of my life and I believe you can hear the emotion in my voice (I was definitely tearing up during this interchange). For those of you who don’t know, my undergraduate degree is in biology and I’ve had a lifelong interest in Great Apes. So much so that I wrote my thesis in college on orangutan rehabilitation and, yes, I was choked up at that exhibit at the zoo too.

Bonobos are considered our closest living relatives (genetically) and I think it’s clear that developmentally Miss Leyba and this little guy are very similar. Thankfully, she doesn’t climb twenty foot tall trees (yet!). That would be too much for this Mama to take at this stage in life.