This isn't good enough for you people?!

Yikes.

I actually haven't been to the zoo here yet, but I think it's a decent size, and I'm looking for more things to do with her outside the house. It's pretty close by, maybe 10-15 minutes away. A family membership is $100, and individual adult tickets are $15, so assuming we usually would all go together, it would only take four trips for the membership to cost less than the individual tickets for Mark and me.

Maybe we can all go next weekend and see what we think of it, and how she reacts. I haven't been to a zoo in ages!

Yeah, if it's convenient, it might just be a nice place to walk around outside, if you're looking for a place to go for that.

Those of you who have taken young kids to zoos, what do you think would be the youngest age they'd really appreciate it?

I took Emmett to the zoo a lot when he was little. I'm pretty sure I've got pictures of him at the zoo in his stroller. Certainly by age 2 he was well into it, and he enjoyed it at 18 months.

Kate, I think a zoo membership is a great thing for kids who are new walkers (no cars! Lots of other kids to look at!), and if it easy for you to get over there and you have a membership then you never feel like you have to make a day of it - you can just go for a couple of hours. We have the panda and seal schedule memorized so we can pop over.

Also, DC's zoo is open at sun-up, so that when she wakes up at 6 am on a Saturday we can go see the animals and there is almost no one there.

I mean, isn't a vibrator basically sort of a robot?

Not unless you define different vibration patterns as "tasks" that are "programmed". I think robot brings a lot of motion and programmability with it. Most of those people are probably requiring more C3PO than R2D2, although also more Maschinenmensch than either. Looks matter.

I feel like in the absence of further information, the house cleaner/caregiver is Rosie from The Jetsons, and the sex robot is Jude Law from AI.

In THAT case, I'm in.

Works for me too.

I feel like in the absence of further information, the house cleaner/caregiver is Rosie from The Jetsons, and the sex robot is Jude Law from AI.

Yup, sign me up.

Kate, I think a zoo membership is a great thing for kids who are new walkers

Oh, good call. She's not walking yet, but I don't think it's too far off. (She's just discovered she can stand on her own, and she LOVES it. Which also means that I found her this morning standing on top of her little stool, holding onto the wall. I see some tumbles in our future...)

And I just realized that I don't actually have to make the decision by the time her birthday rolls around, because it's not as though she'll have any idea about her birthday presents anyway. So I can wait a few months longer, until whenever she seems ready. But we'll still go next weekend to see what she thinks of it.

I was just telling shrift last night that I was ready for the days when robots handle customer service. They can't be worse at it than the humans.