Sea World Sleepover

This past weekend, Alexandra was "finally" old enough to go to the Sea World Homeschool Sleepover. So, we went! We had so much fun and made friends with 2 other families from another city.

Basically, you get to have the park to yourselves! There were about 40 homeschoolers divided into 2 groups and a teenage girl's birthday party group. We got to go "behind stage" at a lot of the shows and see the animals up close. I loved how the animals actually seemed glad to see us and would swim over to say "hello!" The beluga, above, is one of my favorite sea mammals.

For dinner, we had pizza, carrot sticks & ranch dressing. A meal Alexandra and I love! Afterwards, the kids did a craft and I happened to spot this piece of trash in the grass - covered with snails! I think there were 8 in all. Everyone enjoyed looking at them. I wonder why they were there? I guess to get a small meal. Anyway, these were some TINY snails and I'm glad at least this one photo turned out.

Here's a photo of Alexandra and her new friend as we were walking around. We stayed outside until about 9:30 pm and it was totally dark. They didn't even have lights up in lots of places and we didn't use a flashlight, so at times it was very hard to see. The lights were even out in the buildings we went into - but there were lights on in most of the tanks or exhibits.

I liked this photo above about Project Puffin. If you look at the photo in the upper left corner, it has 2 "fake" puffins and 1 real one. The puffins were almost extinct and they placed these fake puffins around and they lured the real ones. This really helped improve the number of puffins. What a great idea!

We slept in the coral reef & shark building. The above photo of jellyfish was taken in the building. I didn't get any good photos of where we actually slept, because it was so dark! We had to walk quite a ways to change into our night clothes, which was kind of fun. About as close to camping as I like to get! And, when we woke up after VERY little sleep (I didn't know you could bring an air mattress & the sleeping bag on cement was very uncomfortable AND I had HORRIBLE allergies which cleared up on the way home), we got to go visit the dolphins - at about 6:30 am! What a wonderful way to start the day. They were so happy & playful! A few people got to touch the dolphins, too!

Here's a little killer "music" to end the post. We had visited the "grown up" first, and it was asleep floating in the water. Then, as we were leaving, we passed the "baby's" tank - she's about 2 years old. She started singing to us. We thought it was so neat!!!