Safari!

 

Today we made our second trip to Lake Tobias. Our first visit there was almost exactly two years ago. I think as long as we live within a reasonable distance of Halifax, PA, we will be making an annual trip there. It's a really nice place to take kids! There are some animals in enclosures (tigers, lions, bears, monkeys, parrots, etc.), but most of the animals are roaming about and can be seen while taking a Safari ride. The buses they use were school buses, and the top part of the bus has been removed. The animals are well trained to come right up to the bus. If you'd like, you can pet a watusi, bison, antelope, water buffalo, alpaca, emu, Texas longhorn, llama, etc. They also have a petting zoo area where the children fed goats, camels, etc. In the reptile building they were able to pet an alligator and a snake.

As we were about to leave this morning, I snapped a photo of Oliver in his car seat because I wanted to compare his picture today to that taken on 9/2/12 when he was in a car bed for the first time as he was discharged from the NICU that day. One of the things that has me a bit nervous about the prospect of possibly being pregnant again is that I'm terrified of having a fourth child be in a NICU. The truth is that it's now a distant memory now that Oliver has been home for a year. Yes, it's difficult to go through at the time, but it doesn't last too long (although it might feel that way when you're going through it). He was absolutely worth all we went through during the pregnancy and the first 10 weeks of his life when he was on oxygen and such. I am so thankful that he has been so healthy over the past year. Aside from the two eye appointments to make sure he didn't have ROP and the two appointments involved with getting him off the oxygen, he has only had well baby visits over the past year. Thank you, Lord! He should have had urology surgery some time over the past year, but we were waiting until we were on Blue Shield insurance so we could have the surgery at CHOP rather than at our local hospital. Hopefully we'll get our ID number this week so I can finally schedule his first urology appointment.