FISHES!!! LOTS AND LOTS OF FISHES!!!

SO! we wanted to go to the zoo, and it was Rachel's birthday last Sunday. Of course, we couldn't go ON her birthday, so we were planning the zoo for monday! Sunday night came and I was looking at the weather report for monday, and it was to be 92 degrees and "scattered clouds." I didn't figure that would be very enjoyable for us. And i knew Kaleb would hate it terribly. so, i decided to look up and see where the Aquarium is in SLC. It turns out that the zoo is another hour or so farther from us than the aquarium, and it was the same admission price. woo! We went to the Aquarium, and had lots of fun! it's devided up into three separate sections, Utah fish, Ocean fish, and South American fish/animals. we started in the Utah fish section becuase it seemed like it would be boring to end with, so we saw trout and salmon and little frogs and endangered minnow-looking silver fish. Kaleb liked watching the trout swim in circles and bump into stuff.

Then we went over to the Ocean area. We started at the jellys. Kaleb LOVED the jellys. he was smacking his hands on the glass and making happy faces at them. We moved on through the Ocean area and they had a shark (rachel's scared of them) and a cool looking octopus that moved from the top of the glass to the bottom of the glass, which was really fun to see. the Octopus also had one of those plastic hamster balls in his tank. i guess he likes to play with it? we also saw a lot of REALLY brightly colored fish in the gaint reef display tank they have. Kaleb watched the bright blue and bright yellow fish the most. they had a lot of "Dori fish" (there was a group of young kids there, and they kept saying "look a DORI FISH!") and clown fish and little shrips and stuff. It was fun.

We finished by going through the South American section. they had penguins. they were REALLY cute. they walk with their wings/fins - whatever you call them - held back all funny-like. and they'd float across the top of the water over to the edge of the land and randomly just JUMP out of the water and land on their feet on the rocks. it was quite amazing to see. then they'd waddle around a little before practically belly-flopping back into a graceful dive once they hit the water. the South American exibit had a lot of poison frogs and stuff like that too. I remember, as a kid, they were my favorite. I liked the black and yellow one the best. Rachel liked the BRIGHT blue one. she loves blue. Kaleb liked looking around, but i dont know if he had a favorite.

We wandered around the gift shop, but there wasn't much. We just went to the little 50 cent smash-a-penny thing and stamped the penny into the cool white-tipped reef shark stamp. that'll be our souvenir from the aquarium. It was a nice day-out, and we had fun. We still really want to go to the zoo, but we'll just have to save that for a cooler day.

:) -PJ