Sea World With Eric

We planned on going to Sea World today, after church. We expected that the big boys wouldn't be interested in going, but Natalie wanted to stay home too. Eric, though, was very excited about seeing Shamu at Sea World.

Once we were there, he loved looking at all of the Christmas decorations. When he saw this big Christmas tree, he excitedly exclaimed, "Christmas tree!" We mostly walked around, visiting the crocodiles before going to see the "Azul" show with the Beluga whales and dolphins. Eric was watching the show so intently that he reminded us of when Natalie was this age. She loved watching all of the animals, divers, and other stunts too. I hadn't seen this version of the show until today.

Our last stop was going to be this giant new playscape. Eric loves going to playgrounds, especially the slides. He made a beeline for one big enclosed slide. I saw him get on the slide and then I heard a thud sound. I saw him come out of the bottom head first. He always does that, so it didn't seem unusual. At first I thought he was laughing and I took a picture of him. He was actually crying and it took me a couple of minutes to calm him down. He wasn't even calm yet when I saw the huge bluish lump on his forehead that was over an inch around and was swollen at least a half inch.

Of course Patrick was in the restroom at the time, and he walked up just then. He joked with me about not being able to leave Eric alone with me, then we went to a concession stand to get some ice. Needless to say, Eric did not feel like playing after this.

Ice cream always makes things better. The lighting is pretty bad in this picture, but you might be able to make out the faint blue bump on the right side of his forehead. Since we were too full after dinner on Friday to get dessert, we went to Brindles today. I don't think I can use the birthday excuse to get extra desserts any more after today. For the rest of the evening, we watched some our taped shows as a family. It was a nice, relaxing end to my birthday weekend.

I dropped Natalie off to play at a friend's house in our same neighborhood) and we saw this. Apparently this pack of wild turkeys has been roaming around our neighborhood for the past few days. I had to take a picture because I've never even seen live turkeys in person, and here are a group of eight of them. This is not a natural place for turkeys to be and we have no idea where they came from. I wasn't about to get out of the car, so I took this picture through an open window. I had to include this picture here just so other people would see the evidence. Weird!