Easy to get right ... a catastrophe when you get it wrong

For those of you who follow me a bit longer and have read my post from Wednesday, you know that it was my wife’s birthday on Wednesday. For those of you who find me for the first time ... now you know 😉

Finding a present 🎁 for my wife is proving to become harder every year. She is a woman who is easily satisfied ... if you give her what she wants, but that’s the trick to find out what she wants. I pressed the matter several times prior to her birthday, but I never got a straight answer of what I could give her.

For our 5^th wedding 👰 anniversary I got her a book about her. You can create a book about a specific person with interesting and fun facts about them and things that happened on their birthday, starsign, etc. It's called 'the Book of Everyone'. This proved to be a mistake, although nice it’s not the kind of present that she likes. Every year a day after her birthday we celebrate another anniversary, that of being x years together. So to mark both occasions I make her a photoalbum with events of the past year. So this she got anyway and was not a surprise.

Finally, a few days before her birthday she said she’d like ‘more family time’! Although not impossible, it’s also not a clear straight answer for a gift.

Then it hit me, our kids are 3 and 16 months, so you’re very limited in your options, but all of a sudden it hit me!

A zoo subscription for a year!

This would guarantee that we’d go several times a year and spend some quality time as a family. Especially since the kids are small, you don’t want to be spending a full day in the zoo, when you know they still long for a sleep in the afternoon. This way we can go 4/5 hours each time and discover a part of the zoo in detail without rushing. Next time we go to another part.

Yesterday we went there for the first time and I almost regretted the gift. The first animals that we saw as we entered the zoo were penguins 🐧. As we stood there observing them ‘sunbathing’ and relaxing, my daughter threw up a tantrum that she wanted to go inside (obviously used to petting zoos, she wanted to go inside and pet the penguins). We managed to calm her down once we got to the aquarium, but for a few moments she made me think wether I’d really got my wife the right present.

_{These cute little fellows almost ruined the present for me}

After this tantrum we had a great time and our kids both loved it. Yesterday we mainly saw:

Fish 🐠
Penguins 🐧
Reptiles 🐍
Birds 🐦
Monkeys 🐒

All the things that kids really liked, without going over the top and giving all of us a reason to go back soon.

I never used to be a fan of zoos, the animals feel captured and neutralised to me. Especially after we came back from our honeymoon to South-Africa I really felt an aversion against zoos. On the other hand, there are animals that couldn’t survive in the wild anymore and it also serves an educational purpose. Besides the animals also get nicer environments these days, more in line with their natural habitat.

_{2 Yellow-Banded Poisondart Frogs well camouflaged to suit their environment}