aquarium (nov. 5 & 20)

there's a lovely little aquarium at fair park that's been closed for the past 2 years. it just re-opened with the fair this fall, and it's affiliated with the dallas zoo, so we were able to get in free with our zoo membership for a few weeks (ending last saturday). we were really excited to get out there and see all the fish :) it's a small aquarium, you can see everything in an hour (including the touch tank, and feeding the sting rays), though they didn't have all the new animals yet (aka, no octopus yet), but we really enjoyed it. we went once with some friends, and then we liked it so much we went back last saturday with daddy. we had a blast both times! here are a few of our favorite pictures.

probably our favorite part of this little aquarium is the touch tank. there wasn't a huge variety, but we loved playing with shells, hermit crabs, snail-ly things, and horseshoe crabs

the other huge hit was the sting ray tank. they were willing to let the kids feed them for free, but only afton was daring enough to hold a fish head between her fingers and stick her hand down into a pool of "sting" rays so they could vacuum-suck it out of her hand...

rayna was all about dancing with the sting rays and sharks though, especially since they couldn't get out, and she couldn't get in : )
all the girls liked dancing, for that matter

some other favorites included:

the sea turtle

the electric eel

and the giant blue marlin (which the kids could pretend they caught, though i don't think they knew why that would be cool, they just liked playing with it)

and from our second trip (where i evidentally didn't take many pictures), the snapping turtle. see him back behind rayna, he was asleep this time, but the first time he had been moving around. he's roughly 230 lbs, and mossy, looks like a huge, clawed rock, the kids LOVED him!

also a big favorite the second trip, the baby albino alligators, they were moving a lot, and rayna was SUPER-EXCITED!!! this is just a short clip of her playing with them. i've never seen gators move this much at any zoo before.