Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

Last year in Virginia we had a lot of fun celebrating St. Patrick's Day. However, this year I didn't prepare on time, so instead of a party, I pulled the kids out of school (it's their half day today) and headed out for a fun field trip to the California Academy of Sciences. It's not as serious as it sounds, but it was heaps of fun. The Academy was brand new, just opened last year, and the exhibits were marvelous and educational. My friend Elisabeth joined us with her three children. Emily, her daughter, is the same age as Gillian and a sweet girl. Gillian and Emily were inseparable today. I was so glad to see Gillian so happy and finally finding "a bosom friend" as she called Emily today.
This building is enormous. Among other exhibits, it houses a 4-flour rainforest display, a full aquarium, a planetarium, a natural history museum, and naturalist center. We all enjoyed looking and learning about anacondas, giant octopus, fruit bats, leaf-tailed geckos, butterflies, penguins, poisonous frogs, catfish and jellyfish, albino alligator and parrots, chameleons and more!

We started with the rainforest exhibit all encased in a glass dome. We followed a spiraling path through the living rainforest with temperature reaching 85 degrees Fahrenheit, and very high humidity. It was so well structured and thought through that you really experienced what it would be like in a rainforest. Each level represented a different rainforest around the world as well as a different area of the rainforest with its corresponding animal and plant life. The exhibition culminated with a beautiful display of hundreds of butterflies and birds. The children loved trying to get butterflies come to their flowers.

The humidity was so high that I could hardly breath, and we had to take the elevator down to the aquarium. Another beautiful and mysterious world awaited us. The aquarium started with the flooded Amazon and the many animals found there. Jefferson was delighted when we found a giant anaconda. He even tried the arm-squeezing experiment displayed next to the anaconda tank, and was telling me all about it (how I should never come close to an anaconda, because there was not a chance I would come alive; he would squeeze me to death).
The Coral Reef took us into a beautiful world of corals, sting rays, sharks, and colorful reef fish.
The Northern California Sea tank enchanted us with the many beautiful star fish, octopus, eels, anemones, rockfish, herring, sardines, and urchins. Here, Gillian found the best part of the aquarium, the Tidepool. She loved learning and especially touching star fish, urchins, and different kinds of ocean creatures. We stayed there for a long time; she asked a lot of questions and wanted to touch everything.
The Water Planet exhibit offered me an amazing chance to photograph some really good looking sea creatures. Here are some of my favorite picks:
We moved on toward the swamp with its unique albino alligator and snapping turtles, after which we had fun playing with the African penguins. There were twenty of them and they loved diving into the water and playing with the people on the other side of the tank. After that, it was time for us to journey through the stars by watching a show in one great planetarium. I got dizzy by the motion, but the kids had a fantastic time. The show was very educational in explaining the formation of stars, nebula, planets, universes, and so forth. This subject was discussed extensively in the car on our way back. The kids were getting hungry so we ended our trip by having them sit outside, eat and enjoy the glorious weather.