Aquarium!

It was chillier today than yesterday, so we decided some indoor fun was in order. A trip to the Haus des Meeres: the aquarium!

We were there 5 years ago with Nina, when I was pregnant with Maggie. My how quickly 5 years pass! Here we were then:

And here they are now (with the same jellyfish!):

Here's another one of Nina from that trip:

And, another one from today. The three of us girls with a Japanese Spider Crab, and Nina looking bored, but similar to the way she looked when she was two:

They also had a lot of snakes and bugs at the aquarium. Maggie does NOT like bugs, so we skipped past those. She only barely tolerated the spider crabs. We also had to leave the bird house because there was a bat, which Nina wasn't a fan of either. That's my girls! Seriously, who needs to look at a bunch of bugs, bats, and snakes? I have enough nightmares thank you very much.

We did like the cute little monkeys in the monkey room. One was looking right at us, scratching his little monkey man parts, looking at us some more, scratching some more, and generally being disgusting. Here he is:

Then he peed right there on the rail and we made a run for it. Male primates are all the same.

Before we left for the aquarium, we'd checked the schedule online and saw that the piranha and shark feedings were at 3 o'clock. So on the way to the aquarium, in the subway, Maggie asked me, "are piranhas white?" But, to me it sounded like she said "ah puh wan is wite." We were walking past the escalators at this point, and we were taking the down ones, which were to the left, but on our right were the up ones. So I said, "The up ones are on the right? Yeah but we're going down."

And she was like, "NO! Ah! puh-wan! is WITE!" Remember that "r" and "w" still both sound like W. So I again tried the escalator thing, and was like "The up ones are right? We're going down! To the left!"

You can imagine the next few exchanges. I thought maybe she was saying "Up there is white." Like, talking about something on the ceiling? I had no idea. She was so angry she started yelling at me. Who's on first?

Finally I asked her to repeat herself one more time to me and Nina (because Nina is the only person in this family mentally equipped to handle the most difficult things), and I again heard, "AHHH PUH-WAN is WITE."

And Nina looked at me and said, "Are piranhas white?"

And I was like, Oh. Of course. Usually I remember to try substituting Rs for the W sounds in words I don't understand, but there was no way I was going to guess that she was asking a question about piranhas. Also for the record, I haven't spelled piranha right once, what did people do before spellcheck??

Well, in case you're wondering now, the piranhas were NOT white. They were a greenish brown with flecks of gold. Maggie and I watched them devour a fish at feeding time, and Nick and Nina watched the sharks.

Unfortunately, the girls were both sneezing a lot today, and Maggie had a little temperature when we got home. Ok at the aquarium too, but I didn't notice it until we were there. Oops. Bad mom. Generally, if Maggie's at 99.5, Nina will be at 103.5, so I'm guessing they'll both end up home tomorrow. Hopefully they'll be better though. I'll keep you posted.