Ad disclosure: as we are Sea Life ambassadors we hold season passes to Sea Life & so did not have to pay to enter.
We went along to the Sea Life centre a week or so ago to visit Santa, watch the Polar Express film in the 4D cinema, and of course the penguins & other sea creatures that reside there. The girls love to visit every month or two and see how much has changed since our last visit.
There always seems to be something new – since our last visit an octopus has moved in which the girls were fascinated by, and James hadn’t seen the newly refurbished Clownfish Kingdom area. We got to see some baby Rays preparing to move into the big Bay of Rays tank by swimming in a sort of tank-in-a-tank, and the girls loved seeing how big the sharks have grown – they’ve been checking in on their progress all year.
When we arrived at the centre, both kids were given a sheet for an elf hunt, and as we explored they had to look for the elves on the tanks, and then open the window with the corresponding number on their sheets. They loved this extra bit of festive fun, and got excited every time they spotted an elf.
Santa was very friendly with the kids and they enjoyed seeing him. Despite it being a weekend (we visited on the 12th – we’ve been busy and then dealing with ill kids since so just getting around to blogging about it… oops! I’m so behind!) we found it pleasantly quiet and barely had to queue for anything.
After chatting to Santa and having their photo taken the girls were presented with gifts; bouncy balls with penguins inside which they do love, but weren’t wrapped so that took a bit of the magic away for them. However, the Santa experience is included in the normal entry fee so it didn’t cost us anything extra, so you can understand this bit of economisation! They were given stickers to say they had visited Santa, which was a nice touch. We didn’t buy the “official photo”, as Georgie looked so unhappy to have it taken, but I managed to get one of her smiling with my iPhone, yay.
The girls jumped, bounced, and climbed off some excess energy in the small but fun soft play area, before we excited through the gift shop collecting two medals on the way – the girls love to stamp their deep sea diver books on the way around and earn their medals.
Of course, we finished up with milkshakes at Ed’s Diner afterwards, as it’s just a 30 second walk over the bridge to get there and on route to the car park… yummy! It is becoming a bit of a Sea Life visit tradition 🙂
While we were there we bumped into a “bloggy friend”* Zara who has written up the Sea Life’s festive offering on the Birmingham Mail site.
*this is an official term in our household, coined by Georgie.
