Moms, kids and school holidays

School only starts again in February, so the kids are already showing signs of cabin fever.  Since we have a yearly pass for the Melbourne Aquarium, I decided we should take a train trip in to the city. 

After drowning my sorrows over the broken lens in a huge box of chocolate, I decided to just have fun with the photography and focus on getting the shot, not worrying about graininess and ISO.  (My slower lens required me to shoot at 1600 ISO).

We started with the penguins again.  They swim so enormously fast! 

 

My daughter loves the seahorses.  This one was really swimming upside down.

We rushed through the  next area, since the kids wanted to get to the interactive display.  We did stop to look at some of the fish and frogs though.  The last frog is quite venomous: the poison arrow frog.

  The kids then took some time to touch the creatures in the interactive display.

Then we got to the jellyfish.  The lighting in there was great!  The kids loved how their white clothes lit up under the lights.

The jellyfish are lit with different kinds of light to show their different properties.

  These babies are about the size of my fingernail.

This giant crab looked like it was posing!  Couldn’t resist getting a shot.

The day ended up being enormous fun, in both the photography and time with the kids.

The Wreck of the W.B. Godfrey

One of our stops along the way was at the wreck of the WB Godfrey.  Not much was left, but a part of the mast and a canon. 

We got there at low tide, so we had a beautiful view. 

The kids of course just loved being able to get out of the car and play on the beach. 

The rock pools always have tons of fascinating things for the kids (and adults) to look at.

The crab caused the biggest excitement.

This funny sort of bamboo is underwater in a shallow rock pool.  Just loved the contrast with the little snails.

   

No-one died when the ship ran aground, but 5 (including the captain) lost their lives during the salvage operation.  The grave was apparently moved when the Great Ocean Road was built.

I am going to be a little quiet over the weekend.  I am trying to get my website up and running, so I need to finalise my portfolio.  Also need to finish processing a family shoot, so between the photos and the house hunting, I am being stretched a bit thin.  Hopefully by Monday I will have everything up and running.

The octopus was awake!

Since it is school holidays, I decided to take the kids to the aquarium again, especially since I had been promising a while.  The penguins were nesting, some asleep.

The crabs were big and fascinating to the boys.

The underwater ferns were beautiful under the magnifying glass.

The shark feeding was really entertaining, as always.

But the best was, that after multiple visits, the octopus was actually active for the first time.