Sparrow Lorelei and Robin Artemis photo gallery

Grandma and Trevor come to visit, July 2011
The Melbourne Aquarium

One of the many adventures we had was to visit the Aquarium. James and I had both been once, separately, several years before and Sparrow had never been. But she loves looking at fish. Even better, they have penguins. I realised this when I was looking up possible places we could go to see penguins that a two-year-old would cope with, penguins being one of Sparrow's current favourite things and also one of Mum's favourite things.

So on Saturday when all of us could come, we set off. Sparrow is wearing her backpack with the leash attached. Made us happier when she was wanting to run around on the train platform and by the Yarra River, though you can see that most of the time she's quite good at walking unattached. She did find the leash a little intriguing.

We made it in through the door, finally, and the first thing you see is... PENGUINS!!!! Sparrow was quite pleased. It's a lovely exhibit. They have King Penguins and Gentoo Penguins, both of which are Antarctic penguins so need to be kept in a snow exhibit behind glass. Sparrow happily looked at penguins and spent quite a while watching them in their swimming pool. Robin was fast asleep.

Most of the Aquarium exhibits are in too low light to capture easily - the contrast between the lit tanks and the dark people space is too large. James' phone camera managed to get this photo though.

Otherwise, I just tried to take photos of Sparrow where she was being lit up too. Like here - in the Rivers section they had these little crawl tunnels under the tanks that led to little bubble-shaped viewing domes in the tank floors. Sparrow had fun crawling around in there, she seemed to like the Fish-O-Dome effect.

Mum got this one of the two of us in the same exhibit - there's one of those crawl tunnels through the big Tiki-face.

Sharks, also in the Rivers area. It's only as I put these photos on the page I realised I mostly managed to get only photos of Sparrow, and very few of anyone else. Partly because Robin slept the whole time.

We stopped for James to get a drink in the cafeteria, which turned into drinks for all of us and some hot chips to share. Sparrow discovered that tomato sauce comes in these little containers but couldn't quite work out how to get to it herself. So Daddy is helping. She is delighted. There is much food that in her opinion exists only to act as a spoon (or shovel) for the tomato sauce. Getting it straight from the container means not having to pretend that you want the other food too.

The cafeteria has the Reef section of the Rivers and Reefs exhibition. It's in this huge circular tank that you can just sit, and watch, and watch, and watch. I remember several of these fish from my time living with Brian, who kept reef marine fish in his much smaller tank.

Downstairs in the Shark exhibit, which puts you in the middle of and underneath a giant tank filled with a number of large friendly piscean-types. Including, of course, sharks. I think the fish swimming past James, Robin and Sparrow here are... no, I take that back, I have no idea what they are. My short-term memory is really shot lately.

In the tunnel, which lets you see the fish swimming around and over you. Sparrow loved this. She is really quite keen on fish. Mostly though she just wanted to climb the rails. James was delighted to capture the stingray swimming over her.

Sparrow is bigger than a baby tiger shark. Robin is bigger than a cookie cutter shark (and by the time I'm writing this, has probably caught up to the Velvet Dogfish :-).

They had a few little marine-themed kiddyrides, and Sparrow had a go in this submarine. She was very upset when it finished and she had to leave - she was getting pretty tired by then. She'd walked around the whole Aquarium herself by that point, and I think her feet and legs were getting a little tired. And it was getting close to nap time. So we left Mum and Trevor to go exploring in the CBD and find themselves lunch, and James and I took the kids home. Poor Sparrow was getting so tired that James ended carrying both her and Robin up the street to the train station entry.