Vacation Week 2 Phase 3

For Phase Three, we decided to go to the coast. The conversation began Thursday morning and went something like this:

Me: What are we going to do there?
Paul: I don't know. Go to the beach, go shopping.
Me: I love it. Except for the go to the beach, go shopping part. It's supposed to rain. And this kids hate shopping. And I don't have any money to spend.
P: Hmm.
Me: We could go to the aquarium.
P: Really!!
Me: (from the computer) Did you know it will cost us $40 to go the the aquarium? Do they think they still have a whale living there or something?
P: That's crazy. I'm not paying $40 plus gas to see sharks and rays and... (getting more and more whistful sounding).
Me: Well, we are on vacation. Maybe we could splurge a little.
P: Nah. It's not worth it. Even though the boys would love it. Nathaniel loves fish.
Me: If we got the annual membership it would be $70...
P: We'd only have to go twice to pay for it!
Me: It would make the boys so happy.
P: Totally. For the kids.
Me: Right. Deal.

So we bought an annual membership. And the kids LOVED it. (So did we)

Jelly Fish

Looking for Sea Otters

Benton committed the map to memory and insisted that the one thing he wanted to see more than anything else was the letter Q. OK, the letter Q was where they keep the octopus. Cool. We'll go to the letter Q. The first time through the octopus caves, the octopus was hiding, so we had to go back later. Paul and Benton probably spent 10 minutes watching that thing. On the way home, Benton was devastated that he didn't see what was at the letter Q. We explained to him over and over again that we did see the octopus. As it turns out, the picture on the map shows a waterfall. He wanted to see the waterfall. The octopus was in a cave under the waterfall. We didn't go up to the top to see the waterfall. I didn't even know it was there.
I guess there's always next time :)

It didn't rain, by the way. It was a gorgeous day at the beach. We had so much fun looking at fish, it was dark by the time we left, so we never even got to the sand, but it was awesome.

There was a play area with these giant animals. Nathaniel must have committed Finding Nemo to memory without my knowledge, because completely on his own, he went up the sea turtle and gave him noggins.
Stay tuned for Phase 4 and some new additions to Nathaniel's vocabulary.