My gave the girls a trip to the Aquarium and the IMAX theater for Christmas. However, between relatives from out of state and a stomach bug, he couldn’t take them. I rounded up the girls and one of their friends and took them into Boston. My brother stepped in to help out, and we had quite a fun outing!

The New England Aquarium has a giant center tank, and you walk round-and-round, looking at the coral reef dwellers at different depths. Along the outer edges of the aquarium are different exhibits about creatures in other habitats. The two types of exhibits that are my girls’ favorites, though, are the two penguin exhibits and the two seal exhibits.

The girls all loved to watch the African Penguins groom eachother and go for a swim. Watching the penguins groom made me think of sisters – helping each other out, but simultaneously picking on them. Just like the penguins (or penguinis, as MG calls them) are helping each other clean their feathers, the girls love to be helpful. BG was helping LG as she was reading a book yesterday, which really warmed my heart! I’m sure the penguins get annoyed by the nibbling sometimes, just as one of the girls will get fed up with the others and start yelling rude things at them.

Unlike the girls, I’ve never seen penguins argue. I don’t speak penguin, though, so when the African penguins bray at each other, so they could be arguing. The adorable Little Blue Penguins just sit around and look cute, kind of like what small children do when they aren’t being picked at by their siblings…

The other place in the aquarium where I really thought the kids and the animals were very similar is the seals. The girls love to swim underwater, splash, and play in the pool, just the way the harbor seals and fur seals do. Admittedly, my girls have no interest in swimming in an outdoor pool when the windchill is -8. They do look like seals and penguins when they tummy-slide down the hill at the park in the winter! I’m taking the girls to go swimming in the Y’s indoor pool tomorrow afternoon, and I’m sure they’ll remind me of seals and penguinis when they’re barreling down the new water slide!

As an aside to anyone who also has monocular vision, the 3D movies at the New England Aquarium IMAX theater don’t use 1 eye green, 1 eye red glasses, instead they use special sunglasses. This meant that I could actually see most of what was on the screen – there was just a shadow, and I ended up with a bit of a headache afterward.