Hanging Out With The Fishes

Today's adventure was the Monterey Bay Aquarium.  Wow, that place is huge!  We thought the kids would enjoy it, but we didn't realize HOW MUCH they would be into watching all the fish.  They could have stood in front of the aquarium window for a lot longer than we would have.  We spent about four hours there total and they were ready to go by the end, but they really liked all of it.  Our family voted that the favorite for all of us was the seahorse exhibit.  What amazing creatures.  The Aquarium does a good job of catering to young kids and has a number of different interactive exhibits.  Something different around each turn. 

Ben kept thinking he saw friends of his from school and I kept telling him, "Ben, it is highly unlikely that we will see anyone we know".  But what would you know, we sit in the jellyfish movie and one of Ben's first grade friends is sitting right behind us.  Who knew? 

Today was another milestone - we gave our kids their first taste of Coca-Cola.  Believe it or not, Coke is all natural, although the American version has High Fructose Corn Syrup.  We've found that ANY corn syrup, not just High Fructose, is bad, bad, bad for Ben.  Serious anger and impatience.  Luckily for us, this was the Mexico version which doesn't have HFCS.  I didn't think Ben would like Coke, since he doesn't usually like anything carbonated (even before we were all natural, our kids NEVER did soda).  But that kid took one drink and he loved it!  He said, "Man, I LOVE BEER!"  Lia asked "If I drink this will I stop growing?"  because we've told her caffeine causes kids to stay the same height forever.  We confirmed for her that as long as she didn't have more than three drinks she'd be fine.  She loved it too.  I'm sure we've created monsters now. 

This day was pretty easy because we were able to bring our lunch and store it in a locker.  But they didn't sell ANY bottled water, and there were NO drinks that our kids could have.  Once we got into the "Global Warming - Save the Earth" part of the exhibit it dawned on me that plastic water bottles probably harm dolphins or something and that's why they don't sell bottled water.  So I tried to ignore my germaphobia and let me kids take water out of the drinking fountains.  Lia said "But Mommy, what about if there's germs on there?"  Ha, funny when you hear yourself in the words your kids say. 

This was a really great experience for us today.  We loved it as much as the kids did.