Life is Beachy! Part One

We took a mini-vacation with my parents from August 25-27 in Corpus Christi. It was nice to get away from home for a couple of days, but I have to tell you, packing up six people (four of them under the age of five) is no easy task. Also, I don't recommend hotel rooms for bunches of toddlers. Lessons learned for next time.

Day One: we went to the Texas State Aquarium! This is one of my favorite places to visit, so I was super excited (maybe more so than the kids)!

Looking for the shark.

Nicky looks tired already!

Checking out the stingrays.

Granddad and Ethan.

 Anna, relaxing in the stroller.

Such a tough life.

We found it!

 

 (I hate, hate, HATE snakes. Just FYI.)

*shivers*

The boys wanted to go down to the lower level and "pet the stingrays" so badly. We could barely get them to go through the rest of the exhibits and look at everything because that's all they wanted to do! We decided to take them down there before their heads exploded, and come back to the other stuff later.

They are so stinkin' excited.

"I touched one!"

 Even Anna got in on the action.

 I had to put this one on here because of Ethan's expression.

And Nicky's shirt.

Can you see 'em?

Lining up for abuse...

 Zoe wouldn't get any closer than this, but seemed thrilled to watch Daddy.

 Poor thing was probably traumatized by my children.

We also went to look at the otters and the sea turtles.

These suckers are fast!

 Ethan loved watching them swim.

 "Hi, there!"

Then, we decided to check out the underwater dolphin viewing area.

Finally, we had stalled long enough and it was time for the dolphin show. We waited to find seats until just before it was going to start, because we didn't want the kids to get antsy. I ended up having to take Zoe inside with Grammy and Anna (who fussed 90% of the time we were there, by the way), so we missed the first five minutes of the show. Suddenly, people started flooding back inside. Mom and I were trying to figure out what was going on, then Dad said, "They cancelled it."

Quick quiz: When you haven't had a single drop of rain in Central/Southern Texas for several months, and decide to go on a beach vacation, what will happen? Yeah...

 Enter monsoon season.

Figures.

Needless to say, they did not start the dolphin show again, and the kids did not get to play in the splash park (pictured above). We stayed for a while longer and watched the clouds moving in, because it looked like it might pass over us for a while. Eventually, though, there came a torrential downpour. 

We let the kids "dig for dinosaur bones" for a few minutes.

We went back inside and wandered around some more. We stopped at the little learning pool area, where a really nice employee named Casey let the boys and Zoe touch snails, crabs, and sea urchins. She was attached to the boys and was happy to spend some extra time with them, one-on-one. She taught them all kinds of interesting things about the animals. There was a brief power outage while we were doing this, but the lights did come back on, so we didn't have to leave.

 "What are those pokey things?"

 "It's hugging my finger!" 

 

 

 "I wanna touch it, too!"

We had to leave at some point. We'd done all the inside activities, and we couldn't go outside because of the rain. So, we headed over to check into our hotel and get settled for the evening. It was a ton of fun, though (minus Anna's fussing)!

(It did rain the entire night. Thunder, lightning, the works. Kinda cool.)