Somebody teach this kid something

Our two year old son has really exploded in his talking over the past week. He is so fun to have short little conversations with and he shows great delight in identifying every single thing that we pass. "Look shoe! Hello, tree! Hi Dog! Oooh a car!" and so on.

Yesterday on our drive back from our great 5 day visit with my parents, we met my husband a few hours outside of Kansas City. He is finally taking his hunk o' junk to get fixed at this dealership like 2 hours outside of town where a guy owes him money. Woo Hoo!

Anyway, this pit stop was going to add a significant amount of time to our drive home - but on the bright side daddy would be with us for the last few hours. In order to break the drive up, we stopped at a zoo in a small town in Kansas. The kids didn't notice the difference but this was a tiny zoo with like 12 animals. There were honestly a total of 7 people there and my husband and I couldn't figure out how they can afford to even open the doors each day. We overheard the other family visiting the zoo talking about the Kansas City zoo and how it amazing because it has a giraffe and some elephants. I have to say I do love the KC zoo but until yesterday, I thought those animals were kind of zoo basics - what do I know?

Clearly it wouldn't matter to my 2 year old what kind of zoo we go to because he apparently knows of only two animals in the world. The first animal we saw was a monkey and so the next six animals were "ooohhh see da muky! There's anoder muky!" This was understandable because those next several animals were chimpanzees, gorillas, etc - things that look like monkeys.

I was however quite puzzled when we walked up to the warthog and he said "ah ha! A chicken. bawk! bawk!" and every animal from then on was a chicken - the tiger, the emu, the raccoon (who knew a raccoon was a zoo animal? I just thought they were the pesky things who get in your trash when you live in the country), and the hyena. Ironically we never even saw a chicken.

I wasn't aware of how little this kid knew until he started talking. Better get on teaching him some stuff.