I have entered the most exciting stage of my life thus far. I am a grandmother. I enjoyed raising our three children, but I cannot believe how fulfilling it is being a grandmother. When I was parenting I had the stress of building my career as well as the responsibility of running a home and taking my children to all of their various activities. Instead of enjoying their sporting events and recitals I found myself thinking of these times as one more thing on my to do list. Now that I am a grandmother I have more time and energy to enjoy the activities of my grandchildren. One of my grandson’s shares my passion for animals. We love domestic animals as well as going to the zoo to see the exotic animals. Recently I discovered a line of zoo books that I have been getting for him.

My grandson and I went to the zoo together the first time when he was only three years old. My daughter cautioned me that this would be an exhausting day because he wants to see all the animals at least twice. I told her that I would take my chances in trying to keep up with him. We had a wonderful time. He not only wanted to see the animals but also learn everything that he could about each of them. Since that first trip we have gone back to the zoo often and also enjoy reading the zoo books together. He is in first grade now and he asked me to come to one of his classes where he was going to present a story about wild animals. He was so excited that day. He was not nervous getting up in front of the class and talking about zebras and baboons, which happen to be his two favorite animals. He did a very nice report and included some photographs that we had taken during one of our trips to the zoo. His report was at the end of the day so we went out for ice cream after school to celebrate what a good job he had done. There is a book store close to the ice cream parlor so we went there first. We found that they had several zoo books that he had not read yet. He asked if he could have one of the zoo books instead of the ice cream as his treat. It took him a long time to pick out which book he wanted. When we arrived to his parent’s house he asked me to read the book to him.

On my way home I went back to the book store and bought several more zoo books to give to him. His love of animals and interest in them is a great thing to cultivate. There are not that many children that would choose zoo books over ice cream.