Thursday, April 19, 2012

Bay of Play

A few weekends ago we decided to take Sadie to Sea World for the first time. With any ticket purchase you can get in free for the rest of the year, so it's a pretty good deal considering we live so close. They are opening a waterpark called Aquatica in May so we went on an upped our season pass to include that for the hot summer months. I was a little worried Sadie would still be too young to get the most out of Sea World, but kids two and under are free, so it's not like we are really losing any money on her, plus it give us a fun family option for the weekends. Turns out Sadie had a blast, she loved Shamu! Honestly, I think she loved all the oohing and aahing the crowd does, and the clapping, but still counts!

The first thing we did was go see this Sesame Street 4D show. Sadie has only watched Sesame Street once, so it's not like she knows who the characters are, but we figured it would be a good show geared for younger kids.
Putting her 3D glasses on.
No, daddy, like this.
This show freaked Sadie out a little though. The 4D part was water shooting out of the seat back in front of you. Holy cow, you should of heard her scream the first time that happened! So needless to say Robert spent the rest of the show with Sadie in his lap and his hands covering the water (and wind) vents on the back of the seat in front of him.

Then we went and saw some alligators. We are, embarrassingly, big Swamp People fans over here, so this we pretty neat to see.
There were close to 20 alligators in this exhibit!
Sadie "ooohing" and yes, she did carry a purse almost the whole time.
Perhaps the best part of Sea World is the Bay of Play area they have. It's this whole Sesame Street themed play area. There are rides, a stage with shows, nets and tubes for climbing and crawling, splash pads, etc. We only ventured into one of the splash pads since it's specifically for tots under 3 and since Sadie isn't walking yet, we figured that was safer anyways. She was very unsure of it all to begin with, but I think seeing this other little boy running and SITTING on water geyser convinced her it was ok. I put together this fun little animated gif of her and Robert running though one:
Sorry for the kind of crappy quality, not sure if there is a better way to save it! Here are a few of my favorite shots from it:

 Here she is inspecting the geyser beforehand, she is obsessed with the faucet in the bathtub and trying to figure out where that water comes from, so I figured she'd love this!

Then Sadie and Robert stomped over to play under a waterfall.

Finally, it was time for the main event... SHAMU! Like I said, she did really good with Shamu. She loved clapping for him and pointing at the big screens. Whenever I was ask her "where's Shamu?" she'd cover her eyes and start playing peak-a-boo with me. Love that girl.
Mom, are we done yet? I'm tired.
Pointing at Shamu.
She passed out before we even got to the parking lot and slept the whole way home! We've only gone one other time so far, and that was for the night shows. It was perfect, we were there for about three hours, it was nice and cool, the sun was going down. I think that's our plan for future trips, either get there first thing when the park opens and leave about 1 or wait until about 6pm to go.


Anyways, take your toddlers to Sea World, they enjoy it and they are still to young to beg you to buy them stuff!

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