First Trip to the Zoo! or not

I must have lost my mind...but I decided that today was a GREAT day to take my little man to the zoo. Now let's just clarify that he is 9 months old (tomorrow) and I know that he will not know or understand the concept. But he LOVES staring/chasing the dog so I assumed that an elephant or a monkey would be triple as cool. So, I call up my friend Katie (who is still on maternity leave) and since I am on spring break (oh the joys of working for the school system) and see if her and baby Chase would like to join me on this adventure. She says of course because she would love to get out of the house, walk around and let the baby see the outside world. So off we go.. mind you it is about an hour and a half drive.. but the kids did awesome! They both napped and we chatted and we were like oh this is going to be so easy right!?

WRONG.

We get there 30 minutes after the zoo opens because of all the traffic from the Cherry Blossom festival.. and all parking lots are FULL and there are people with small children walking in front of cars without looking everywhere. At this point baby Chase is hungry and starts to cry and Ethan looks at him and tries to talk to him and even threw gave him a toy. So w are pretty desperate and we look for spots to parallel or a garage and there are nothing within a 10 block radius. Ethan is now upset because his friend is so upset. I make Chase a bottle and feed it to him from the front seat and I give Ethan a sippy cup. This keeps them content for about 15 minutes. In the mean time we decide we are just going to go get some lunch and walk around a bit so we can at least get something out of the trip. Which we finally do another 30 minutes later with highly pissed upset kids. That 45 minute drive through DC  (after the 1.5 hours it took to get there) where many people honked at us, we almost hit a few pedestrians, our children screamed, and we didn't even get to go to the zoo took a few years off my life

Alls well that ends well. Katie and I had yummy crab cakes for lunch and I got a new shirt from Ann Taylor Loft and Ethan enjoyed riding in his stroller outside and people watching.. which was close enough to a zoo within itself.