Under the Sea

    It is always nice to have family come and visit.  This last October my sister Bethany and her two sweet childern (Emma and Joseph) came and visited us here is Colorado.  With six childern around we have to find something to do or the house will be a child's best playground.  So what do you do with kids (age range is 10 to 2) to keep them busy?  In Woodland Park they have a dinosaur muesum where they have dinosaur bones for lots of dinosaur that aren't very commen.  I think the kids loved it.  The next day it was off to Denver to go to the aquarium.  This semester Tori is studying fish and her class went to the aquarium a few weeks later but I wanted to go and this gave us a good chance to go and something fun to do for the day.  So, here we go under the sea.

Guess who?  We each took turns being a survivor of the shark tank.  To think that one would want to actually get in a cage just to swim with the sharks.  No Thanks!!  I asked Beth what scares her the most and she said, besides her kids getting hurt, she is scared of a shark attacking her in the ocean.
The Aquarium has different regions in it.  Along with seeing different types of fish it takes you on a trip to the different water regions around the world.  The first area is the fish, ducks and otters that are most commonly found in the Colorado region.  Camping in different parts of Colorado there are alot of rivers, lakes and mountain regions that hold many different types of fish.
The next area we headed to was the wet zone.  They have a simulation of what happens in a desert during a flash flood. The kids were amazed to see all the water flooding over rocks.  Surprisingly enough with all the crazy things that my children do they didn't stand in the middle of the room and try and get wet. 

I think the next room with the most fun.  There were tunnels where the sting rays would swim right over the tunnel.  This is the best way to study the underside of the sting ray without getting in the water.  There were a few sharks, schools of fish, sting rays, eels and sea turtles.  They have sleepovers at the aquarium and this is the favorite spot for the kids to sleep in.  What is your favorite fish?  We stayed in this area for almost 15 minutes.  The kids were amazed with all the different things in the area. 

This is Noelle looking for the sea turtle.  On select hours and days they have a little mermaid show.  We were a little late for the show.  The fish were enough for these kiddos. 

   We were watching a diver cleaning up the bottom of the tank.  He was pretty cool.  Brayden was very interested in seeing what his job was.  They have opportunities for people to go diving in the different tanks.  The youngest age was 10.  This was a pretty good tank for kids to go diving in.

 

  The next area was the rain forest.  There were some piranha fish in this room. Beth, Matt and I were standing there reading the info about the fish and it said that they could eat a full size cow in about three minutes.  The fish were very calm and there wasn't anything that looked like these fish were very dangerous.  Abby came and joined us and the conversation.  Matt said Abby lets see and tried to pick up Abby.  Her eyes got really big and she got very scared and started getting a little defensive.  For the rest of the time she kept her distance from Dad.

They also had four beautiful tigers in the exhibit.  Tigers are the only cats that love to play and be in the water.

 I have to admit that I think sharks are really cool animals.  My favorite shark is a tiger shark or a hammer head. The last section of the aquarium is an underwater sunken pirate ship.  They have alcoves that you step into where it feels like you are in the water without getting wet.  This tank had holes on the floor with plexiglas where the sharks were laying on the bottom of the floor.  These had some very big sharks and sword sharks.

At this point the kids were starting to get a little tired or maybe it was the parents.  We saw some seahorses, Nemos (clown fish) and Dory(Angelfish). Tori is working on writing a paper.  When she went to the aquarium she was able to find her fish which is the grayling fish.  I'm looking forward to seeing what a grayling is. 

They had some really big fish.  This is a very large puffer fish. I thought puffer fish were suppose to be small.  This just proves size really does matter.

The last thing we did was looked at all the things your would find on a reef or around shipwrecks.  Look who we found in the reef!

 Had a blast with cousins and seeing all of the different things.  I told Beth that next time we will have to come out to her and visit different things in Utah.  It is nice to be close to family and wish I was closer.  I have lots of fun memories of playing with my cousins and all the crazy things we did.  Looking forward to another adventure with the cousins and this time hoping for no head collisions or sickness.  Hope you enjoyed our undersea adventure as much as we did.