Sea World Day 1- May 17

I finally convinced Matt is was time to take a trip further than Cornville May 16-19!  This is our first trip as a family!  We did have to ditch Charlotte's preschool graduation for the timing to work out. 

 The kids did way better than I thought they would.  They really were great in the car, sleeping different places, and missing naps.  I can't wait to go again!  We drove after work on Thursday- I picked Matt up from his training at ASU.   We stopped half-way in Yuma and had some gross fast food.  The kids hardly slept at all which surprised me but I had so many car activities (more on those later) they were still great!  We used Matt's hotel points from all those trips to Alabama last year and got 2 free nights at the Marriott near my brother's place in San Diego.  The breakfasts were awesome! 

The next morning we went to Sea World.  Abby was crying because she thought we were going to go to Disneyland.  I didn't feel too sorry for her!  It wasn't terribly busy because we went before CA or AZ schools were out and on a weekday.  We didn't want to worry about our DSLR with the water shows etc. so these are all phone pictures.

Sea Lion Show

Watching sting rays while Matt and Charlotte rode  the Atlantis roller coaster- they were being so cute dancing and chasing them.

Matt said she did awesome on her first roller coaster.  She barely made the 42" cut-off.  He said he thought she'd be much more scared- then she bugged us the rest of the day to do it again.  So at the end of the day we did it one more time.  I made Matt buy the overpriced picture- that they took forever to put on a CD- probably longer than they waited in line for the ride!

 Matt has relatives from Moose Jaw Canada so we had to get a picture of this sign in the arctic area

We were there right after they hid all the fish and then they let the polar bear out to find them.  The kids loved looking at all the animals.

Lunch- thank heavens for this stroller we borrowed from my brother's family!  I don't think we would have been able to last nearly as long except Matt could push all the kids and give them a break.  By the end the pregnant lady was ready to be pushed too!  I don't know why we always go to Sea World when I'm pregnant!

Abby's and Olly's faces crack me up!

They really loved Elmo and Cookie Monster- especially Olly. He kept telling me he wanted them to come to our house and play cars!  It made me want to take them to Disneyland to see their reactions to all the characters!

We made it almost to closing time! That's a big accomplishment for our kids who love to nap!  We probably could have used an extra hour or two to see one more show and a couple more exhibits but we did a ton considering how many little kids we have.  We went on every ride they could go on and saw almost every show and exhibit. And did 3-4 trips to the bathroom with 2 newly potty-trained toddlers.  

That night we met up at a park with my brother's family and 2 of our friends from high school and their families for dinner.  It was fun to see them- we were all freezing though- who knew it could be so chilly in May!  The weather was so nice we never wanted to come back- it was nice and overcast for our Sea World day.