Jessica, Bob and Zoe

On our last day in Florida I spent about about an hour and a half swimming with dolphins, the whole point of our trip.  For half an hour I did the structured swim, where the trainer tells the dolphin to do specific behaviors with you.  I was with another girl, from England, with three dolphins - a mom, dad and ten month old baby.  The baby didn't do any of the behaviors, except for jumping, she just hung out next to her mom.  But she was awfully cute! The time went by MUCH faster than I'd remembered, but it was a lot of fun.  The dolphins were really energetic and seemed to be having lots of fun.  So here are some of my favorite pictures!

Belly rubs are always fun

I love getting dolphin kisses!  It was actually hard staying next to him

(I think this was Bob), there were other dolphins swimming and making

waves and I had to really work to stay next to him.

This was the funniest part, the foot push.  They each put their nose on one of my feet

and pushed me backwards.  When they stopped the trainer said she'd been working

with them on pushing people farther, so she wanted me to put my feet up again and

they would come back and push me again..........

As you can see, one dolphin got to me first and started pushing, before

the other one got there, so I started going in a circle.......

So here comes the other dolphin, trying to reach my foot........

I tried so hard to help them out, but one dolphin was still pushing

and the other dolphin was almost in front, so I'm bending my knee trying to

get my foot on his/her nose.  It was quite funny and the trainer finally

let us give up!

Jessica dancing with me!

Bob bringing me a hoop.

Poor Jessica, I had a lot of trouble holding up a pretty heavy

hoop while treading water.  I was supposed to hold it OUT of the

water so that she could jump UP and through it, instead she had to

kind of jump vertically, poor thing.  She was a good sport about it, though.

This was my favorite part, getting kissed by both dolphins, I got to

pet their chins while they were there.  I loved it.

I got a face FULL of saltwater as they pulled me, they pulled so fast!

I was amazed they didn't crash me into the wall.

Here's the little baby, Zoe, jumping with her parents.  Obviously she can't

jump as high as them yet, but it was very cute to see them all jump together.



Mimi the Sea Lion

I didn't think it would take me this long to get around to posting more pictures, but alas life happened.  When planning this weekend, even though the whole point of it was to swim with dolphins, I wanted to make it extra fabulous and fun, hoping that soon I'd be pregnant and not able to do any of these things.  I thought swimming with a sea lion would be pretty cool and different and I actually had to talk Chris into doing it! We ended up being the only two in the water with 168lb sea lion, Mimi.  She was very sweet and lots of fun.  It was quite different that swimming with a dolphin, a little more relaxed, and dare I say, almost more fun.  With the dolphins, you hang out treading water and wait for the trainer to tell the dolphin to come to you and do whatever behavior.  With the sea lion, we were standing and she was hanging out right next to us the whole time and interacted more with us.  We did the typical hugs and kisses, but a couple of the more fun things we did were swimming around the enclosure with her and "holding" her in the water.  She was cute while we were swimming, if she got too far ahead of us she would look back to make sure we were still there.  And my FAVORITE part of the time with her was at the end, we were still in the water and just kind of chatting with the trainer, she was hanging out next to me and randomly gave me a hug, it was so cute! There's not a picture of it, unfortunately, but it made my day.  So here are a bunch of pictures of us with her, I don't think many of them are very good of me, which I'm sad about, but there were a couple I liked.

This one is hilarious - Chris looks like he's stalking her!

Here's one of her "checking" on Chris, so cute!

This is me doing the command for "say cheese!"

Chris telling her to do her shark impression

"Holding" her

My favorite picture

She was just told to hug Chris, but she wouldn't stop kissing him!

Then the trainer told had her kiss him on the lips, he had to

wash his mouth before kissing me again!

This is her hug - basically just putting her flippers on us, but still cute.