Sea World

We planned to spend an entire day at Sea World because Tommy (aka the boss of this and every vacation from now until eternity) loves sea creatures and we were pretty confident he'd walk around with a look of awe and amazement on his face.

But the night before we went I said something about it on facebook and the responders (who I totally trust) were preparing me to not be blown away. So I started to panic and worry about what else we'd do instead.

As is usually the case when I panic it was entirely unnecessary. A bunch of other people told us they (and their kids) had loved Sea World and Tommy was over the moon. And so was Josh. And John just wanted a bottle so we keeping him happy was easy. It was beautiful.

Somehow we accidentally showed up at the park exactly 30 seconds after they opened. (If we had planned that we might have arrived by noon.) You could see our parking spot from the front gate and we were on the first rounds of all of the Sesame Street rides. Which is exactly where we started.  Tommy loved the rides and thought it was hilarious to make the Elmo car fly high up in the air exactly the way I remember doing to my mom on Dumbo. I have been to Disneyland once in my life and honestly I was too young to remember most of it, but I swear I can still hear my mom's voice going "oh no! higher? and higher? oh no! we're too high!" because I was so much braver than she was. We probably could have stayed on sesame street all day long. We rode the rides there, then swore we'd come back before too long and set off to see the penguins and Shamu.

The whale show was surprisingly amazing to me. The animals are HUGE and beautiful and so incredibly smart. I couldn't believe what they were capable of and I couldn't believe how ridiculously emotional it made me. I may or may not have teared up. #whatasissy

From the whale show we headed straight for the Dolphin show.

*side story: one time josh and i went to sea world with some friends while on a cruise. we only had a few hours there and the friend reading the schedule thought the Xs in the box meant "no show at this time" instead of "show at this time" and we missed EVERY show except the dog show. we went to sea world and watched a dog show and nothing else. that's why the shows mattered to us this time.

The Dolphin show was so extraordinarily cheesy that I still can't figure out why I was so impressed. the dolphins did cool tricks, the divers did cool tricks, the cheesy girl stood and waved her arms around to show how happy she was. It was all very nice. But impressive? Hardly. So why did I leave and immediately look at the schedule to see when the next show was so we could see it again? I don't know.

After seeing more animals and exhibits we accidentally walked past Shamu again just as it was starting. So we went to watch a few minutes of it one more time.

Side Note: I wish I had known that you don't have to wait in line for these shows. The stadiums are HUGE HUGE HUGE and you are going to get in even if you walk in 5 minutes after the show starts. Don't waste your time waiting in line.

More animals. More food. More sunscreen. And we were off to see the seals, feed the flamingos and watch a 4D elmo show. And that's when we learned that Tommy hates glasses and that he will gladly sit through a blurry movie if Elmo is in it and water squirts out of the seats in front of you.

After the seal show we realized we probably wouldn't make it back to re-do anything and made our first efficient plan of the day. A path to see all the remaining exhibits on the way out.

We were finally over tired and way too sunburned to stay out any longer and decided to come home and order pizza before falling asleep.

We would go back again and again if it wasn't so crazy expensive.

I've never been so glad for my dear friends to be wrong.*

*They weren't wrong, they were simply warning that they weren't so impressed and hoping that we weren't disappointed. I have good friends all around.