Sea World- firsts for Alex

Our wonderful friends decided to invite us to come to IBM's co. day at Sea World with them (so nice!), so yesterday we made a trip down there for a day of fun.

I know that I've already blogged about how great Sea World is, but we learned some new things and Alex tried some fun new things. And it was the most exciting thing that happened all weekend, so what else am I supposed to write about?

We learned that getting there at 1:30 is kind of a pain. Cars were backed up and we waited to get in the parking lot for about 10-15 minutes. Now, this could happen constantly on Saturdays or it could just be that we went at the wrong time. Who knows.

We also learned to hit the water park first. We went in and only had to wait about 5-10 minutes in line (the whole capacity thing... there can only be so many people in the water park. I had to explain this wait to the nice woman with gold teeth behind me who kept saying, "come on! What's the hold up?")
When we left the water park at about 4, the line was SUPER long, so we were really glad we weren't trying to get in at that point.

THE WAVE POOL

The first place we went in the water park was the wave pool. Last time we went, we were there at about 3:30 and after about 2 times around the Lazy River, Alex was so tired that we went home. So this was our fist time in the wave pool. It was awesome! Alex loved having Jon hold him and have the waves "crash" into them and splash in his face. He'd watch the wave coming at him, hit the people in front of him and would yell out "ear ih comes!" (here it comes) as loud as he could. He laughed a lot and thought it was great fun!

SPLASH ATTACK

Then we headed over to Slash Attack, which had 3 flights of stairs creating 2 different levels of platforms where people would fill up TONS of buckets and dump them. I think there were also large squirt guns. There was a lot of water flying everywhere!
Alex loved the the teeter totters they had. When you go up it sprays a stream of water into the face of the person on the opposite side and then you get sprayed when you go down.

This next picture obviously isn't us (but I DO wish I looked that good in a bikini!), but it shows the area and how much water is going on. Oh and the teeter totters (directly to the left of the guy). I just realized there are a lot of black swimming suits going on in this picture.




Alex had a hard time getting off the teeter totter and giving someone else a turn. So there's a question... if there is a constant flow of kids who are waiting for a turn on the teeter totter and your kid could play on it all day, how long should you let your kids stay on it?

After swimming, we went over to get some food from the "special place" (thanks IBM!). It was nice to be able to eat something without either 1- having to pay a lot, wait a long time, and sit in one of their crowded resturants or 2-go out to our car for a good meal or drive out to McDonald's and then drive back in.

After eating we experienced more of Happy Harbor, which Alex was a big fan of. He LOVED the soft house! I'll have to post a picture of it later, but it's kind of like a bounce house and it had large foam shapes in it that we would build into towers and Alex would "tah toe!" (tackle) them. He also loved climbing up on the step and jumping down into the soft house. I think we're going to have to go to one of those blow up places...

Alex also went on his first ever ride!!! We went on the spinning paint cans and Alex loved it. Spinning should have been his favorite part right? Nope. He was thrilled with the wheel in the middle (to spin our car). We could have been sitting still and he still would have loved that ride.

We ended the day with dolphins and sharks. After not having a nap all day (and actually doing better than I thought he would without a nap), he fell asleep on the way home.

And since we have a lovely minivan, I climbed into the very back seat and turned on the overhead light and got to read my book for about an hour or so uninterupted. I wouldn't have been able to do that in the car because the lights would have been too distracting for Jon to drive. Bless the mini van!