Yesterday, we visited the woodland park zoo on what you call a typical PNW day. As mentioned in several of my posts, due to covid, we have been holed up in our house without much interaction with the outside world. Since our son is now close to a year, we have become a bit more risk tolerant in meeting with people. We still wear masks and social distance and meet in open spaces as we are not comfortable yet meeting indoors. I hope things will improve and we get back to some sense of normalcy soon.
Two of our friends and us planned a week in advance to go to the zoo on what we anticipated would be a nice spring day as the weather forecast was marginal with a pretty nice day forecast the day prior. One of our friends, unfortunately (or fortunately 🙂 ) was not able to get tickets so it was just us and a friend of ours who has two daughters. One of them is a 18 month old pandemic baby just like our son with very little social interaction to the outside world. The day prior to our planned visit was such a gorgeous one that we were hopeful that the day of our visit will not be as bad as predicted. But alas, it was a cold, wet and windy day in the pacific north west. We decided to brave the weather and not miss on an opportunity to get out of the house and meet up with friends. We would have liked it to be a nicer day so that the babies could have gotten out of the strollers and interacted a bit (socially distanced of course).
While our visit lasted only an hour and half long, it still felt good as it brought about some sense of normalcy. If it were not for the pandemic, this visit would not have been such a big deal. It would be a part of normalcy that our kid would have grown up with. Play dates with kids his age, visit to a park or zoo and visits from friends and family. It’s hard to believe that our son will be a year old next month and neither his grandparents nor his uncles have visited him. With the pace of the vaccines ramping up, I am cautiously optimistic that a new normal (totally different from pre-pandemic or peri-pandemic reality) will emerge where we have social interactions like before but a lot of peri-pandemic norms will persist.
Here are a couple of shots I took while we were at the zoo:
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