Aquarium (July 15)

After staying up late with a hopping mad Zoë baby, we had a quiet, lazy morning at home before heading off to the aquarium, one of my mom's favourite places to visit. She loves the ocean—not going in it, necessarily, but simply being by it. That's something nearly incomprehensible to some people, like my sister Josie and my daughter Rachel (and, probably me, too), who have a hard time being near the ocean and not going in (even if it's the coldest month of the year).

And I have to say that visiting an aquarium in the middle of a desert was pretty cool.

Here's Zoë riding on the back of an orca, such a lucky baby:

And here are a few of the things we saw...


A coral reef exhibit of sorts (I love reefs):

These little garden eels that reminded me of the creepy, shrivelled up mer-people in Ursula's garden, only cuter:

There's a shark tunnel you can walk through:

A hefty pair of megalodon jaws (my mom was nice enough to pose for me):

This is a caiman resting mostly under the surface of the water (you can barely see its eyes above the water):

There was also a Utah "native species" exhibit that I thought would be pretty dull, but was actually quite neat. This cute little otter was sleeping with its head right against the glass:

And these cute salamanders (my mom and I talked about memories of finding them on the farm (her childhood farm, for her, and for me, at her sister's farm):

Zoë slept through most of the aquarium (good thing we didn't have to pay for her visit). When we were finished walking through (some parts we walked through twice) we left to pick Josie up from campus.

And then we went home. I think this was the day David brought pizza for dinner (and my parents went up to Salt Lake to tour the assisted living facility my grandma's moving into). My siblings and I ate dinner, played with Zoë, and took a nice walk together.

Here's my smiley girl:

She's wearing an outfit my mom bought in high school because she saw it at the store and thought it was so cute that she couldn't not buy it. I was her first baby to wear it and now my babies are wearing it. When she bought it, her mom warned her that it would go out of style before anyone could wear it—and perhaps it has, but babies never cared much about style, have they?

Here's Josie trying to convince Zoë that soothers are cool:

She'll take it sometimes (but other times she acts like it's poison):

And here's a picture of Zoë holding her hair. Her hair is quite long in the back (even if she's got nothing going on up top):

Rachel and Benjamin used to accidentally pull their hair, too, when they were this age—because they had hair. Miriam missed out on the accidentally-pulling-one's-own-hair stage—because she didn't have enough hair to pull.