A safari adventure

Saturday morning we packed up the car and headed north once again. This time our destination was for here:This is a park out in the middle of nowhere Toronto that transports you beyond the regular zoo experience. It is, in a word, incredible. In addition to seeing things like this

all through out the park, there is also a safari adventure that you can experience in the comfort of your own car. The animals--lions, cheetahs, rhinos, giraffes, baboons, just to name a few--are in natural habitats right in front of you. And when I say right in front of you, I mean the baboons jump onto your car and the rhinos bigger than a mini-van cross the street in front of you and the giraffe leans his head into your sunroof to take a bite of the pretzel you're holding.

I'm really not kidding. Our friend Mike encouraged us to go before, in his words, "some national company or government group finds out about this place and shuts them down or puts all those animals in cages." Now that I've seen it with my own eyes, Mike was right. It feels barely legal to sit 10 feet from a Mufasa-size lion and ten or so lionesses. One wonders if those lions are going to get mad and just start crashing windows of the nearest car. Lucky us, that didn't happen and the safari was amazing.

(It occurs to me here that you want pictures. Pictures would be fitting, wouldn't they? Imagine our horror when we got home and realized that we had been so taken with the events of the day that we did not take one more picture after I snapped the above elephant shot! When it's so good you forget to take pictures, that's saying something, isn't it?)

When Lillian says, "all done Mama" it means she wants to get out of her stroller and run around. About half way through the day, we decided to set her free to run as we paused for ice cream. So she ran and hopped and jumped and ate ice cream and...ran head first into a little boy who was also running at top speed. He essentially clobbered her. It was inadvertent, yes, but a clobber nonetheless.

Trent saw it all happen. When he brought her to me he had blood smeared on his cheek and neck where Lillian had rested her devastated self with a bleeding mouth. Spatters of blood also covered his shirt. When I saw him coming toward me with my girl in his arms, I thought, "wow, that's a lot of blood."

For such a dramatic scene we both remained remarkably calm. He explained that she had been clobbered by a little boy twice her size. We wiped the blood off his cheek. And he deposited a sobbing Lillian in my arms.

Lillian doesn't cry easily, nor does she cry long. Truly, she's not one for drama. So, when I saw her crying so hard she couldn't catch her breath, and as I felt her little body shudder with phantom-like sobs, every mothering instinct I own was put on high alert.

I wrapped her in my arms. I held her close. I wiped away tear after tear. I caressed that head of golden curls. I rocked back and forth. And all the while I whispered in her ear, "You are safe. You are all right. I am here. I love you. You are my baby. You are safe. I am here."

For forty-five minutes we did this. Holding, rocking, whispering, sobbing. I held her as we walked back to our van. I held her until I thought my back would literally snap in half from the weight of holding her, all the while whispering reassurances in her ear, holding her close. The best part of it all was that she wanted me to do it, and I was the only one she'd let do it.

Trent and I talked about her reaction on the drive home. When you're hurt, you want your Mom. You want her to hold you close and whisper in your ear and tell you that everything is going to be okay.

Who doesn't need to know that it's all going to be all right? Who doesn't want to be held and rocked and comforted?

Who knew that giving that comfort was better even than recieving it?

Ah, being a mom is the best.