Monterey

I always wanted to take the kids tot he Monterrey Bay Aquarium so when the second day of the reunion was to be spent in Monterrey doing what ever we chose to do on our own we decided to go to the aquarium. Sam's family joined us so the older boys took off on their own but we got a few shots of them before they left.

Chad and I spent the time with Court, Aiden and Brody. They had a great time, but it was super crowded!! I still got some great shots though.

We decided this had to be the UGLIEST fish ever. It is a sun fish.

The new exhibit was the seahorses and sea dragons.

Court and Aiden had to have this picture posing with a statue of this sea horse giving birth (notice the tiny horse protruding from the belly) my sister later informed me that the males sea horses have babies, so this is apparently a male.

After the aquarium we meet everyone at Denis the Menis park for lunch. We had a picnic and then took the kids to play. They had great fun and Melinda gave Chad her camera to get pics. he had a great time taking hundreds of pictures of the kids and everyone else at the park...even the strangers. he was looking forward to Melinda having to sort through all the pictures for the ones of our family.

After lunch my brother Nate's family was going to walk the fisherman's wharf by the park so we decided to join them instead of heading back to the hotel. I love this pic so much. It totally shows Aiden's attitude. He was mad and so refused to join us for the pic so I told Nate to just take the pic anyway.

I had to get i pic of the old guys building a sand castle. Cool castle, but every though it was creepy for him to be by himself playing in the sand...no kids with him.

Grabbed a quick shot of the kids in the harbor between wharfs. We wend down the fishing wharf first and then over to the commercial wharf.

All down the wharf restaurants are giving out samples of their clam chowder to taste. Since we are not a fish family I was not interested in trying each one so I decided that Nate and Laura's could decide on the best one and that one I would try. Also since the kids are not allowed to say something is gross until they try it I told them they had to also try the final winner. I told them I would buy them each giant jaw breaker if they did (I was going to get it anyway) Tyler wanted this giant sucker!

At the end of the wharf we spotted these sea otters. if you look close you can see one has a crab he is eating and the other had a bottle he was using to break muscles or something against, we could hear him hitting them against it if we listened close.

We had so much fun walking and seeing everything. On our way back we stopped at a candy shop where I got the kids their jaw breakers and we also got a huge bag of salt water taffy that we sampled on our walk back to the cars. The best one was the peanut butter taffy it had small pockets of peanut butter in it. Yummy! Thanks to Nate and Laura for letting us tag along.