A Time For Baughnding: Summer's Last Week

Last week was the last week in Trinity's summer vacation. School begins on Monday. So, we wanted to have a great final week off. In June, we purchased season passes to the Chattanooga Aquarium and we decided to take a day trip up to enjoy it.

We woke up, packed up a picnic lunch, some towels and swimsuits and headed out early Monday morning. It was a little long drive, but the kids did wonderfully in the car! They couldn't wait to find out where we were going. Once we got there, they were very excited and began asking if we could do all the things they remembered from our last visit.

Even though it was just a one day trip, I took tons of pictures. So, I'll be splitting up this post (and its pictures) between a couple of posts. They'll be mostly pictures with the captions telling of our fun. Enjoy our memories!

The aquarium had a lot of volunteers "working" who were very helpful and filled with information. One offered to take a family picture in front of the otter habitat!

Another volunteer had an otter hide for the kids to pet.

The kids had fun petting the beluga sturgeon - and it actually swam close enough for them to reach it (well for two of them to reach it).

The sting ray petting tank - another touching success. Xander had much more fun simply splashing

"Hey mom - I'm a sting ray."

Our kids become the attraction in the big glass tube.

The kids are all waving to the toucans because Craig had them each convinced that when they raise their claws up, the toucan are really saying either "Hi" or "What's up"- depending on how high the claw was in the air.

Here fishy, fishy, fishy

To make the trip even more affordable, we packed a picnic lunch. To avoid taking all our food and children and blanket down into the hot sun, we simply had a picnic in the parking garage. It was easy to do and cool in the shade.

Shark protection cage or child confinement area? You decide - it's all in how you utilize it. After all, look how happy they look.

What an amazing wall of jellyfish.

We came across one of the viewing windows that had a couple of divers in it. They were actually giving a talk about the tanks, the fish, pretty much all about the aquarium. Well, one guy was giving the talk and answering questions while the other was the bouncer to keep the curious sharks away.

Through the diver session, we found out that they would be feeding the sharks and fish later that afternoon. It was quite interesting to watch. The amusing thing was that most of the sharks weren't interested in their food. However, the larger fish would come behind the sharks and eat what the sharks had passed up.