Sea World "Adventure"

On Saturday we went to Sea World with the kids. It seemed like a great situation. My school paid for the tickets via "FAU Kid's Club" and even chartered a bus to go up to Orlando. Sounds great right? Well, we had to get up at 3:30 to make it to the school by 5:00 am. We left at about 6:00 and things were okay until Alex woke up an hour later. He's normally a good natured kid that sleeps well. But he's been sick all week with a cold and he's never been one to sleep on our shoulders. So he started crying and crying for the remaining 3 hours of the bus ride. About 2 hours into the crying Erin turns to me and says that her tummy hurts. I quickly handed Alex back to daddy and began searching around for a bag, a good idea but just a few seconds too late. That's right, Erin threw up all over her clothes, seat, pillow and blanket! (Let's just say I got a new pillow out of this.) Now, we've had a couple of plane rides that have been doozies... but I have to say that this trip may have topped them all. By the time we got there and I had rinsed out all the affected clothes and things and taken them back to the bus, it was almost 11:00 am. We hadn't even entered the park yet and Jared and I were absolutely exhausted!

This was before we entered the park (Erin ran away from the picture)

Erin was really a trooper. She wanted to walk the whole time and besides the incident on the bus, she had a lot of fun and was a very good girl all day.

Riding the carousel was a highlight for Erin as well as petting the stingrays. She also kept asking to see the sharks and was really excited to walk underneath them in the shark tunnel.
I said that I like the dolphins because they look so happy.
Erin said, "I like sharks because they look so mean." Go figure.

We got to see 5 different shows and they were really amazing. Whenever they would do a trick Alex would yell "Wow!" and start clapping. I think I would like to be a dolphin because they do so many fun things. A sea lion wouldn't be bad either, except for the barking. One of the coolest shows was called "Pet's Ahoy" and it was basically a set of a town on stage with a whole bunch of little doors that animals would run out of. A cat would run out of one door, climb across a rope, press a lever that would trigger something else, then run into another door. Then another animal would come out and do something else. There were dogs, cats, ducks, birds, a rat, a skunk and a pig. I don't know if my description does it justice, but I have never seen anything like that before.

This is a good representation of how tired Alex was all day. My conclusion? Sea World is really fun if you are 3 and a half or if you are 31. It's not really that fun if you are 1, have a cold, are really tired and want to run around or climb the steep steps during a dolphin show but can't. Oh, and it's not all that great dealing with a kid like that either. Being stuck on a bus going 45 mph for over 4 hours while everyone is glaring at you for not being able to shut your kid up? We don't plan on doing that again anytime soon. Other than that, Sea World was great!