do you sea what I sea?

It's our last day in Orlando but it's not all bad because we are at SEA WORLD!!!! After a full week of theme parks and roller coaster rides I was ready to see some sharks and pet some sting rays! And we got to do both! First, we walked through the aquarium. I love aquariums!

I was in awe of this "fish". I think it may have been some sort of seahorse but disguised as a plant! It was crazy looking and so cool at the same time! It was almost like it just floated through the tank in silence and slow motion.

The stingray aquariums were beautiful...

and the boys LOVED the tube where you could actually pop up into one of the aquarium tanks and feel like you were swimming with the fishes!

The first Sea World show we saw was the dolphin show! It was really cool! The dolphins were beautiful and could jump unbelievably high! The show also included a lot of aerial work by the trainers including a woman dressed like a beautiful bird who flew high into the air and two men who did many aerial tricks in unison before diving into the water from probably 40 feet up!

If you look closely you can see a dolphin jumping HIGH into the air! He almost looks like he's flying!

In addition to this dolphin trainer doing aerial tricks they also released a REAL parrot into the show that flew over the audience time and time again. It was beautiful!

After the dolphin show we were able to go into the dolphin aquarium and see the stars of the show up close! One of the dolphins seemed to love Maddox!

I absolutely loved the sea turtles! It always reminds me of Finding Nemo to see them swimming around and I picture them talking like surfer dude's back and forth to each other! Ha! 

When we came to the stingray pool we were ALL excited! First we had to find the perfect spot to pet the stingrays and then we bought some food to feed them. The trainers were selling shrimp. Feeding the shrimp to the stingrays was kind of weird but awesome all at the same time. We had to gently palm the shrimp in our hands and hold them beneath the water. The stingrays mouth is located underneath it's body pointing toward the bottom of the pool so the stingray would swim over our hands and scoop the shrimp off of our palms with their mouths. It was a strange feeling!

It messes with your mind when you are outside in the Orlando heat (plus humidity) and then you enter "The Arctic" smack dab in the middle of Sea World. It's not air conditioned or anything but the walls of ice look very realistic and they are HUGE so as you walk between them your brain tells you you should be cold but your body is definitely very hot! It was a cool area...unfortunately, not literally. Ha!

We ate lunch in "The Arctic" and then went to our next aquarium.

I couldn't get a good picture inside this aquarium but it was so cool! The entire floor was an aquarium too and as you walked across the glass, fish were swimming all around! I could have stood there for hours! The scenery was constantly changing!

When you have boys you CANNOT miss the shark aquarium. (And it's always one of my favorites too!) They had a lot of cool things in the shark house including the jaw of a shark the kids could put their faces in and a wall of measurements that told you what shark was closest to your size.

Our absolute favorite, though, had to be the shark tunnel! It had a moving sidewalk so you couldn't stop and stare but it was UH-MAZING!!!! Ash was a bit nervous inside (even though he loves sharks) and so he didn't want to take any pictures.

We were able to feed some sharks after we left the shark aquarium but unfortunately the sharks weren't very hungry. We went ahead and threw all of our shrimp and fish into the tank but only a couple pieces got eaten. I think we got their too late and the crowds had already fed the sharks a big lunch.

We had some time before we had to be at the Shamu Show and so we stopped at one of the cartoonists in the park and had him draw the kids. He did one of Seth alone and then did a picture of my boys together. We told him what the boys liked and he went to drawing. He was crazy good! And funny too! He joked with the boys the entire time he drew asking them about their girlfriends and telling them he was drawing them wearing pink tutus! I was one hundred and ten percent impressed with the picture we took home. The artist drew Maddox as a football player (wearing orange, of course) and Ashtyn as a scientist. He captured them both perfectly.

Here is the finished product! Perfection!

We bought some frozen cokes and salty snacks on the way to the Shamu Show and then nabbed some good seats early. The last time we went to Sea World we didn't get there early enough to sit in the Soak Zone and so the boys were anxious to make sure we got wet this time! We didn't sit in the very front but found seats comfortably in the middle of the Soak Zone. I was hoping we'd get wet for the boys but was secretly hoping we didn't get TOO wet...

The Shamu Show was unreal! Just as I remembered it. There was one whale in particular who was enormous. The daddy whale! When the whales first started doing tricks and splashing the audience the daddy whale would always swim on the other side of the tank soaking the audience directly across from us. I was starting to worry we wouldn't get wet at all...well, apparently I just needed to practice patience because about half way thru the show the trainers sent the daddy whale our direction and faster than we could even prepare ourselves the whales giant tale was splashing the pool sending a WAVE of water over our seats! It was the strangest thing. You can literally see this wall of water coming at you in mid air and you know you're supposed to be excited about it but you also feel this instinctual need to get out of the way! Ha! When the water hit us it was refreshing and exciting. The boys were laughing hysterically and I couldn't believe how wet we had actually gotten! Our visit to Sea World was officially complete!

Our last stop (still soaking wet!) was to see the arctic animals. They had a wall of REAL ICE inside!

We got to see a baluga whale, a polar bear and take a simulated helictoper ride to deliver supplies to a scientific crew in the ice and snow.

In the end, I was glad Sea World was our last park of our Orlando trip. We had ridden so many roller coasters and spinning rides that I don't think we could have had one more day of that and Sea World let us slow down and avoid long lines in the heat. It was a ton of fun! The boys each picked out a stuffed animal of their favorite animal of the day at the souvenir shop before we left. Ash chose a sea turtle and Maddox chose a polar bear. We are completely worn out but in the best way possible. Now we have to go back to our condo and repack so we can hit the road early in the morning on our journey back to Oklahoma!