Giraffe from above

This is Taji reaching his long blue tongue up to eat sweet potatoes being fed from the balcony in the giraffe barn. Hand feeding the giraffes is one of the most fun parts of my job. It's always hilarious to see what the giraffes will do just to get a chunk of sweet potato. Sometimes they will even steal chunks from each others' mouths. My favorite thing is to feed them at ground level. They bend down and breathe their sweet breath into my face and allow me to touch their soft noses. We'll be having public giraffe feedings when the new Africa area opens June 6th. Hopefully lots of people will take advantage of this amazing and cool opportunity. (And hopefully the goofy giraffes will cooperate :)

Kaylin's paper making kit is even more pitiful than I thought it would be. We drove to pick it up Saturday, stopping at Target for a blender on the way home. The instructions didn't give a good paper to water ratio so we're STILL waiting for the first sheet of paper to dry! I think it will take several more days. Had we done it right, the kit would only make one sheet of paper every 24 hours. Um, yes, I want to shred tons and tons of newspaper and repeatedly clean my blender so my kid can have one stupid crumbly piece of paper per day! Our joke of the weekend was that we were going to find a piece of screen and use Gene's useless ShamWow! to soak up the excess water. Pound it here, pound it there and voila! A perfect piece of recycled paper!!! Dry as a bone. If finding the screen wouldn't be so much effort and the ShamWow! wouldn't ruin the paper that has been four days in the making I would totally do it! Of course, then the paper would probably stink like the ShamWow! Is that what Germany smells like?