Celebrating Ella in Monterey

I'll start this post with a confession: I am overwhelmed and less than thrilled about the idea of planning birthday parties for all the girls in my girls' classes.  If I can, I encourage a birthday outing instead of a birthday party.  Though I'm pretty sure I'm not gonna get off the party-hook for Ella next year, this year she was happy to choose 2 days in Monterey as a special way to celebrate her birthday.  Yay!  I much prefer the memories we can make as a whole family at places like the zoo, the water park or Disneyland to a whole living room full of new birthday toys anyway.

For her birthday outing to Monterey, Ella had a whole list of things she wanted to do and I think we managed all of them.  One was to have her favorite Mexican food followed by the birthday sombrero and serenade at Chevy's.

Another was to play on a beach and write "Happy Birthday" in the sand.  We tried to take "Watch a sunset over the ocean" off our summer bucket list, but it was just too chilly and overcast to wait for it.  We spent a little time running down dunes and drawing in the sand, but mostly freezing.  It was so awesome to jump in our hotel's hot tub after the beach and Ella will tell you that this hot tub was her favorite part of her birthday outing in Monterey! 

As mentioned earlier, the girls have been earning money all year doing chores and behaving well.  They've known for a long time that they wanted to spend their hard-earned money on something from the aquarium gift shop.  When the time to finally shop came, they were thrilled to pick out penguin and otter stuffed animals, and I don't think they've put them down since!

We took a morning walk along Monterey's Fisherman's Wharf to see some wildlife.  We watched pelicans all lined up on railings and these entertaining sea lions playing King of the Mountain on this little floating barge.

We were actually able to spend two days at the aquarium, but I'll put all the pictures together.  FYI, if you stop at the information table on (or near) your birthday, the aquarium will give you this special button to wear and then everyone will say "Happy Birthday!" to you.

We just couldn't wait to check out the new Jellies Experience exhibit at the aquarium.  Since we first saw it late afternoon of the day we arrived in Monterey, we had it practically to ourselves!  I was expecting it to be more peaceful and soothing, like the seahorse exhibit, but it had a totally different feel!  Black lights, tie-dye and Jimi Hendrix quotes on the walls and groovy music gave it the "Outta This World!" feeling it was going for.

And wowza! were these jellyfish something to see!  Again, as we so often do on aquarium visits, we just had to marvel at God's creativity!

There were lots of interactive parts to this exhibit.  We could draw our own digital jellyfish, bounce stools up and down to make a jelly's bell pulse and learn about a jellyfish's symmetry by kaleidoscoping our faces.

These guys were our favorite.  They have a fancy name, but we called them "the light-up jellies".  They had flashing lights along each tentacle-- as if they were powered by batteries!  So awesome!  We saw some of these cool light-up guys catching and eating fish too.

I've gone on and on about these jellyfish, but I know I have a number of readers who know the aquarium and I wanted to give them an idea of what this new exhibit is like. 

Besides the new jellyfish and getting to watch a school of 20,000 sardines swarm the Open Seas tank at feeding time, we also enjoyed the rare treats of another active octopus and a skate willing to be touched.  All in all, one more awesome aquarium visit.  Ella picked well!

The two last things on Ella's birthday list were to eat lunch at Pizza My Heart, which we did, and play at Dennis the Menace park.  We call the bumpy slide in the picture above "The Butt Buster".  I laugh when I look at Dave's face-- he's such a good dad!

Having split our aquarium visit into two days, we had lots of time to play at this favorite park.  The girls thoroughly explored each of the play areas and wore themselves out so well that Delia actually fell asleep in my arms later on.  I suppose being that tired is probably a good sign of how hard you played and how much fun you had over the course of two days, though!

Happy 7th birthday to Ella!  (More details about her actual birthday coming later today...)