Billy's Day Out

We went to the zoo and my son expected everything to be exactly as it is in his animal book!

Billy turned two yesterday. For the longest time he had kept asking to go to “hotel” and “Mysore” (after a short holiday we’d done there in May this year), and so we decided to honour both and take him to Mysore for a short 2-day trip for his birthday.

For good measure, we also decided to go to the zoo his morning - copying a tradition where we take our daughter to show her “animals” every birthday (1 and 2 at London Zoo; 3 in Mysore Zoo; 4 Kabini; 5 Bannerghatta; 6 (belatedly) Tanzania; 7 BR Hills JLR; 8 (belatedly) Singapore Zoo; 9 - we didn’t take her but a school trip around her birthday took her to the Daroji Sloth Bear Sanctuary, and we counted that).

When we planned the trip two weeks ago, we told him that we will take him to a “zoo” where he will see “all the animals in his book”. I remember him namechecking some animals in his book a few times, asking if those will be there. I remember telling him that he would see lions and leopards, but not llamas in Mysore.

I remember re-watching Baby’s Day Out a couple of years ago with our daughter. This was the first time I was rewatching it since the time I had watched it around the time it first came out in the 90s. Like most average movies from that time, I didn’t remember anything, and it was only when I watched it this decade that I realized that the baby’s actions in the movie (riding a bus, going to a veterans’ home, etc.) reflects the actions he had seen in his favourite book. Basically by the end of the day he ends up covering all the “pages of his book”.

I realize there was one problem in terms of prepping Billy for the zoo by telling him about his book - he expected it to reflect his book. So this is one of those baby books with a picture of an animal and its name on every page. It is a part of a set of some 10 books, including the alphabet, colours, numbers, three different kinds of animals (farm animals, wild animals and birds), etc. etc.

And like a good (now) 2 year old the son has mugged it all. He knows exactly the order in which the animals appear in the book. A couple of months ago I wasn’t sure if he knew what each animal looked like, or if he had just mugged up the order, and so I started opening random pages and asking him, and asking him to show me random animals. It turned out that he knew what each animal in the book looked like.

Today it became evident that he also knew the order in which the animals appeared in his book, and because we had prepped him that he would see “all the animals in his book”, he expected the animals to appear in the same order at the zoo!

We saw the zebra, and he immediately asked for the “giraffe” (facing page to zebra in the book, but at the very end at the zoo). We saw deer and he immediately wanted to see a kangaroo (again facing page in the book; as it happened, there are no kangaroos in the Mysore Zoo, but the next enclosure had wallabies!). When we saw the rhino, he wanted to see hippo. And when we later saw the hippo, he called it “rhino”!

Maybe it makes sense for the Mysore Zoo (and other such zoos) to publish children’s books like the one above - using pictures of animals in the zoo, and in the very same order in which they appear. And there can be many such books - one on big cats, one on birds, one on herbivores, etc. etc. There is a ripe opportunity in there!

On another note, Billy didn’t seem to be that interested in the zoo - he couldn’t distinguish between real animals, their pictures and models! He was as excited by statues of giraffes in the zoo as he was by the real giraffes. We showed him a gorilla, and he immediately pointed us to a PICTURE of a gorilla nearby.

On yet another note, Mysore Zoo is nice (I like it better than the Singapore Zoo - about the same number of animals but vastly more compact; the London Zoo is far superior to both) but crowded (even when we got there at 9am on a Monday morning in the Indian tourist off-season). It was full of large tour groups speaking Malayalam (one clearly was a school group, another from a college, etc. etc.).

I would appreciate much more consistency in the information boards about the animals (they were in several formats, making it hard to parse), though.