Florida Trip -- SeaWorld!

We spent two days at Seaworld. He was happy to repeat many of the same activities the second time around. We got to feed fish to a dolphin and stingrays (by "we" I mean me -- Ian liked watching but didn't want to touch the fish). Other than that, his favorite things were the shows, especially the dolphin show. Here is his happy dolphin-watching face in the stands:

For a long time after this trip (and still), he will excitedly describe how the dolphins "jump! out of the water!" with accompanying excited hang gestures! He specifically asked to see this again the second day, so we did:

We also hit the sea lion show, which was a silly story involving two sea lions and some humans. Here's Ian's "can you believe they can do this?" face from the stands:

Here are the sea lions, and the walrus (!) who made a brief appearance at the end. Walruses are huge!:

In addition to Seaworld, we also saw farm animals on the trip. On the very rainy Thursday Ian and I braved the nearby petting farm, which was quite interesting. We had it to ourselves, due to the rain, so we got a personal tour. Ian held baby ducks and chicks, happily watched me milk a cow (another thing he didn't want to touch), and learned about all manner of farm animals. In particular we learned which animals like to be out in the rain (pigs!!) and which don't. All the goats were huddled under their shelter when we arrived in their area (it looked like it fit all but one, so they were constantly jockeying for position, with one falling out into the rain and then pushing back in). When we came into their area, they happily came out to greet us, then ran back under the shelter as they saw us leaving. Ian didn't mind the rain at all (he loves puddle-jumping, and was well prepared with his new boots and raincoast), and was happy to discover this play fire engine hanging out on the farm as well:

One of Ian's other favorite animal-related activities on this trip was watching and feeding the ducks at the hotel pond -- he wanted to do this at every opportunity and Pa probably spent enough time feeding bread to ducks with Ian to last him a long time!