Hollywild

When I was pregnant with Brady, I became aware of the What to Expect website and soon became a member of the board for moms expecting in February 2010. It was a really great network of women from not only around the United States, but from around the world. We all shared new and exciting things about our pregnancies and were even able to ask questions to get advice from others at the same stage of pregnancy. Once our babies were born, some as early as December, and others as late as March, we had less time to spend on the boards and eventually just decided to become friends on Facebook with anyone we had connected with so that we could stay in touch. When we moved down here, it brought us close to a few Feb 2010 moms just north of the South Carolina boarder in North Carolina. We decided it would be great to get together with the kids since they are all exactly the same age. We decided to meet in the middle at a petting zoo/wildlife preserve called Hollywild. It's named Hollywild because it houses quite a number of animals that have been in show business. Pictured above is Brady with the baby goats and two of the little boys we met up with.




Brady is fearless and loves any dog he sees in a park or even next door in our neighbor's yards. Puppy is one of his few words because he has several stuffed puppies, his security blanket is a puppy and he just loves puppies! Of course now he thinks that all stuffed animals are puppies and also all live animals are puppies, but we're working on teaching him the difference. When we arrived at Hollywild, the first thing we did was let the kids run around and pet the animals at the petting zoo. Brady's favorite was the baby goats because they are very used to humans and expect any human (no matter how tiny) to give them food. This means they come right up to the fence and even poke their little heads through. Brady was laughing out loud and even ventured to pet some of them, and very carefully I might add.





We went on to check out the stage animals and saw a bear and zebra that had appeared in movies, commercials, and even music videos! We also got to see the lion that they used while drawing The Lion King, which Brady just watched a week or two ago for the first time. There were peacocks and roosters running around free for people to touch them and we even got to see several types of monkeys. The last stop on our tour of Hollywild was a safari tour. We loaded onto a bus in which the windows had been hollowed out so that you could reach out to pet or feed the animals we came in contact with. We saw several deer, cows, emus, tigers (caged of course), horses, zedonks (a cross between a zebra and a donkey), and even a rhinoceros. It was a great day and it was great to meet some new friends that we'd only ever known via the internet!