Making Gingerbread

Here at our house we love cooking with the kids. Jacob is always in the kitchen with Chris on the weekend, cooking bread. He knows the names of all the ingredients we use and what all the processes are like kneading, folding and so on. I'm so grateful that's he's learning these skills young, one day he's going to make someone a great husband! lol. Anyway, gingerbread has got to be one of our favourite things to cook. Jacob loves rolling out the dough and cutting it with the cutters, decorating the gingerbread and icing them. Unfortunately, it can be a bit fiddly and time-consuming so we don't do it that often! But we wanted to make some special christmas gingerbread the other day. It pretty much took us the whole afternoon but Jacob had a lovely time (not sure how much got eaten and how much got cooked in the end though ;)) Here's our cooking attempts:

The Zoo!

Well, we finally got around to going to the Melbourne Zoo with the kids the other day. We had actually planned to go for Jacob's birthday in May but we got caught up with other things and it never happened. In the end, Chris decided to take an annual leave day so we would actually get there! We hadn't been to the Zoo in years so it was great to see it all. All the elephant enclosure had been done since we last went and looked really good. Unfortunately they were working on a new seal enclosure so we didn't get to see the seals. The kids had an awesome day, running around everywhere and seeing the animals. They were definitely tired by the end of the day though (as were we!)

The new elephant enclosure:

In the butterfly house:

Orang-utans (they came up so close to us!) This one was about a metre away (with glass in between of course ;))

Watching the giraffe:

Wombats sleeping in their den and Jacob discovering a ‘wombat hole’:

In the great flight aviary (Esme is FINALLY asleep in the ergo!)

The bears:

Frog house (we have a white lipped tree frog like this first one at home, it changes colour from brown to green)

Out of everything to do at the zoo, I think the kids enjoyed running in and out of these plastic flaps at the frog house the most!!

A chameleon: