The Maritime Aquarium

Yesterday we went to The Maritime Aquarium with Val and Carson. We, as always, had so much fun with them. We put two car seats in the backseat of my car and trucked it all the way to Norwalk - which might be considered a bit of a road trip for some, but is actually just my daily commute to work.
It's been quite some time since Scarlett had last been to The Maritime Aquarium - 8 months, to be exact. Joe and I brought her there when she was just about 3 months old. When I compared pictures from then to the pictures I took yesterday I couldn't believe the difference. Oh time...why do you go so fast? Here are some of the best comparisons of then vs. now...

Ahh...my giant baby. Well, getting back to yesterday's trip...we got there just in time to see the seals eating.

Val and I pushed our way up to the front so that Carson and Scarlett had a great view. They were very interested in the seals.Then we were on our way to see the rest of the aquarium...if we could only find it. We wandered aimlessly to the Ancient Sea Monsters exhibit, which wound up just being the hallway to get to the IMAX theater. Val and I, along with our 2 strollers, braved the wheelchair elevators to get up and down the floors. Long story short - it was a ten minute procedure to walk down a 10 foot hallway containing hand drawn pictures of ancient sea monsters - pictures that I, literally, could have drawn myself. Slightly disappointing...but I guess the odds of them having real life ancient sea monsters on location were slim to none. Okay...this picture was next to impossible to get. I thought that I could hold both babies and line them up perfectly with their respective lobster and tarantula heads...I thought wrong. I think I threw out my back in the process. There was a lady standing behind us who offered to take the picture - she may have been cued by the fact that Val and I were laughing hysterically while trying to accomplish this mission impossible. For some reason, she took about 20 pictures of Scarlett only, and then just this one of them both - which, as you can see, is pretty comical. I think she was more interested in her reflection than the fish.Scarlett and Carson hung out in the Jellyfish room. Then we moved on to the creepy, open mouth fish room. The Maritime Aquarium had a new playspace set up for children under 5. Unfortunately, they had no staff member monitoring whether the children using the playspace were actually under 5 or not...which most were not. Val and I politely found the one corner of the space where no children were playing. Go figure, about 2 minutes later it was a crazy mosh pit of older than 5-ers. They did have fun while it lasted, but we moved on after that. There was also a frog exhibit set up there...and in honor of the frogs we saw (and because I thought Scarlett "had" to have something from the gift shop despite the fact that she was practically asleep in her stroller by this point and didn't give two diaper-fulls whether she got something or not), I bought Scarlett a "frog with noise" which ribbits when you squeeze its stomach. I'm not sure if "frog with noise" is its scientific name, but that's what the tag on it said...so we'll go with that"Frog with noise" would get loved, then thrown, then picked up by me, then loved and thrown (repeat...repeat, but with less and less love).Scarlett got tired of the game quickly and was completely over "frog with noise" despite the fact that I wanted her to love him and all of his $8 dollar-ness. I instead got this priceless look. "Frog with noise" was then tossed into one of the dozens of baskets of toys this child has. That's it...that was our day.