The Aquarium with Friends

Last Friday we headed to the Seattle Aquarium with our friends over at He Shall Direct our Path. We had so much fun! And, there is NO possible way that I could add to Brooke's highly accurate description of how the day went, so I'm not even going to try. I'll just add a few of my pictures to the mix, and call it good.  You should read her post if you want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. 

 Most of my pictures are of the kids from behind, because that is what happens when you are looking at exhibits.

 I'm not entirely sure this is much better.

 This one, however, with the illusion that they are safely behind a chain link fence, suits me just fine. It's actually the seals that were behind the fence.

 The baby girl otter, a recently-born resident of the Aquarium, looked all snugly and cute, napping away on her rock.

 The burping contest that didn't happen. :-)

 The goofy crew. I had to laugh when I got home and looked through all my pictures, and the kids all have different bags of vegetables or sandwiches in their hands all the way through the Aquarium. Apparently we ate our way through it.

 The best part of this trip was having someone to just chat with, and sort of follow the kids everywhere around the Aquarium, without rushing them through anything. They spent a TON of time at exhibits that I never would have guessed would have intrigued them.

 Watching coral reefs get trimmed. This was pretty cool.

 The tide pools are always a huge draw to the kids. I'm pretty sure they spent the most time here, and they actually got to feed the sea urchins kelp, besides touching them, and the anemone, and the sea cucumbers, and everything. That is such a cool exhibit. The aquarium staff was really generous with their time with all our kids, and they all got a lot of additional attention and learned a lot of really cool stuff as a result. Surprisingly enough, none of them fell in.

 Beautiful Sea Stars.

I was an idiot, and parked the Rover in a spot that I could only use for four hours. And, I ran back to give the hungry machine more money, only to discover that it wouldn't take it because my maximum allowable time was up. So, we had to leave a little earlier than we would have liked. But, it ended up being a good thing as after we left Seattle we went out to Garrett's work and traded cars with him and spent the rest of the afternoon in Les Schwab getting a lovely little screw in the tire removed, and the tire fixed.

Thanks for the fun day!! We'll have to do it (or something like it) again soon.