The big girls and I went to the Aquarium alone for the whole afternoon.

The goal was to finish the Kids 4th Membership Challenge. They received very nice pins for completing them in 12 months. We've got 2 more challenges to do before Christmas to get a 2nd pin.

I also brought our clip boards with some loose paper to draw on. MsE was most into this. MsC enjoys reading the information displayed at each aquarium, so that takes up more of her time. It was hard to draw at some of the aquariums, because we're not allowed to sit. You must keep moving or the staff will stand over you until you stand up.

MsE was pretty upset at the first aquarium when the staff told her she couldn't sit on the floor to draw. She wouldn't leave until she finished her drawing. It took us a few minutes to find a position that wasn't sitting that worked for her, but we figured it out.

After that I steered us past any of the aquariums where we would have normally sat, because MsE insisted on drawing a picture of almost every aquarium we peered into. Many of the later aquariums had shelves that she could rest her clip board on and that worked much better. She was annoyed when she ran out of paper and begged some more off MsC.

At the shark tank, MsE drew a shark and then copied the word shark from the sign. She didn't like that the A was a Shark Fin on the sign, so she corrected it to a real "A" in her writing and then added the Shark Fin at the end of her word.

MsC says it's not sitting if one foot is on the floor. She has a hard time with all these rules. I have a hard time with all these rules too; they're constant and ever changing. After a while out in public, MsC generally says, "I hate COVID! I wish COVID never came..., but if COVID hadn't come, they would have knocked down the Merlion."

She loves the giant merlion statue on Sentosa Island. It was scheduled for demolition, but the work to revitalize the island and create a new central path has been delayed indefinitely due to construction worker shortages in Singapore.

A few moments after I took the picture above, I pointed out a huge fish to the girls. It was right beside MsC and about 5 feet long. There was suddenly a sort of muffled bang that we heard through the tank. It startled the fish which popped it's huge mouth right open as it was passing MsC's head. The three of us jumped and screamed. No one else seemed to notice; I'm sure they wondered what on earth we were screaming about.

Here's another of MsC's drawings - a stingray. She decided it was a girl, so she added eyelashes. She knows every stingray has it's own spot pattern; that fact was part of our last visit's Challenge.

After our 2 hours in the Aquarium we were tired, so we got Mommy a Pumpkin Spice Latte at Starbucks, and then stopped for ice cream close to home too. The girls decided to write letters to their friends on the Starfish cutouts that came with their Aquarium package while we rested at an outside table.