Surprise Mold-A-Rama!

When my mom was visiting recently we took her on her first visit to the Milwaukee County Zoo, and what did we stumble across?  A new Mold-A-Rama!  One we've never seen before anywhere:  A cow!

How cool is that?  We knew they had a hippo now (a rare figure--we only have one other that we found in Florida on our big Mold-A-Rama road trip) because Aden picked one up for the family collection when she was at the zoo on a field trip last month.

But we had no idea our zoo had a cow Mold-A-Rama.  They moved all the machines that are normally outside to indoor locations for the winter, and when we went to look for ice cream in the dairy building we stumbled across a machine there, and were super excited when we discovered it was a cow.  Mona got one first, but when I went to make one for the family collection we ran into a bit of trouble when the figure got stuck in the mold.  I found a long piece of cardboard and snaked it up through the retrieval door and managed to knock it loose.

Stuck Mold-A-Rama!

This brings our collection to 142.1.  (I think--only Quinn knows for sure.)  We still have dreams of dropping everything to run down to Texas for the Mold-A-Ramas at the San Antonio Zoo, and we're hoping this is the summer to finally get the ones in St Paul.  There are still two or three oddball places scattered about on our list, but those last two zoos would mean we have covered all the major Mold-A-Rama locations in the country (and therefore the world!).  And of course we need to get our own machine running well enough to put out.  That's a goal for this summer.

But how fun to be surprised by a Mold-A-Rama at our own zoo!  We did pick up some dinosaurs there this summer, but those were expected during their special dinosaur display.

The cow was completely unexpected.  That's sort of the upside of our zoo never really knowing what they have or where.  Brookfield Zoo deals with a lot of collectors and they always know exactly what figures they have available and for how long when you ask at the information booths.  Milwaukee never has any idea, and they always just hand you outdated maps and wish you luck.

And luck we got!  In the form of a plastic cow.  Life can be so much fun.