Folsom Zoo, Folsom, CA

I've heard a lot about the zoo at Folsom, but never gave it much thought until a friend of mine told me that most of the animals there were rescued animals! With Diego playing at home most of the time, we are all into animals and rescuing them! Every pretend game at home is about an animal getting lost in the wild and Dhruv and Aru rescuing them! We've saved blue morpho butterflies, baby jaguars, red eyed tree frogs and what not.

We decided to take Dhruv and his now favorite friends Swathi and Sneha to the zoo.

The zoo was better than what we expected too see for the following reasons.

1. We covered the zoo and its animals in two hours.

2. We saw a tiger in very very close quarters.

3. We saw grizzly bears! Thought it was a myth until then!

4. All animals were indeed rescued from either dangerous hide outs, or from unfortunate incidents.

Just being there made us feel Diegos!

The train ride was an added bonus.

The kids had a blast and so did we.

Bishop's Farm at Wheatland, CA

Okay! Halloween and pumpkin patches aren't my most favorite things! But this Wheatland pumpkin patch has been a thing on my to-do list for 8 years now. People have been raving about the actual corn maze and huge pumpkins forever now! We all know how equations change with kids being around. We tend to complete most of the things on our to-do lists to avoid the guilt game. So here we were, in the middle on nowhere, in a little town called Wheatland. The only reason the place in familiar to us, is Bill is from there. Bill is my family idol. We all worship him, my son included!

I was surprised by the whole thing. I looooved it! I was so excited to pet little goats, jump on corn trampolines, watch pigs racing, feeding donkeys and ofcouse rolling around big pumpkins! The weather was great! Dhruv, Arun and Bill enjoyed every moment of being there as much as I did.

Arun clicked some great pictures. This will be done next year too. The only regret was we were supposed to go with two other families, but the timings did not work out! See you next year too Bishop's farm!

City of West Sacramento, Fire Department

Mark, my friend's Brie's husband is a firefighter. I had casually mentioned to him over dinner once, that Dhruv is into Fire Fighters and their books. The very next weekend, we got a chance of a lifetime! Mark and Brie invited is to the inaugration of a fire station in West Sac.

We picked up Brie and Tilden and went there early morning.

We got to see an act, with fire fighters coming down the poles and loading stuff into the fire truck. They came back and put off a pretend fire at the station. We got to see retracting ladders and firefighters climbing on them. It was just like seeing Fireman James (D's favorite book!) come to life. D sat on Mark's lap and watched the whole thing. The other cool part was, we got to see behind the scenes. We went up to the rooms of the fighters and saw how they lived.

D and Tilden had such a blast. They got to put off a pretend fire with a hose!

I am really proud of our firefighters. Its such a noble job!