Here Come the Firefighters

Newsletter 2021-08-02

Our day started with a record number of timeouts and ended with a 911 call in a mostly empty parking lot. Not exactly our most successful trip to a zoo.

But first, a promise.

A thousand years ago (or maybe it’s only been a few months), I told my kids we’d do a bunch of mini-vacations over spring break. We went to an indoor water park where the abrasive concrete sliced their skin like a cheese grater and to a children’s museum where the soft carpet threatened nothing worse than rug burn and had a day-long Marvel movie marathon in between. But we didn’t get to the last item on our list, a day-trip to the Cincinnati Zoo. That particular institution and I have a lot in common: We’ve both used social media to generate far more internet fame than we deserve. My kids have long been enamored with Fiona, the zoo’s baby hippo, whose adorable mini-animal antics took Facebook and YouTube by storm. Never mind that she grew up into a 1,300-pound behemoth. My kids were obsessed with seeing a world-fam…