You better watch out…

Way too early a start this morning due to a very excited to be five after all little girl :). She opened all her presents with gasps of delight, exclamations of how much she loved everything and a real savouring every gift sort of style. No idea where she gets that from, I’m far more of a rip all the paper off quick sort of gift recipient ;). She did some further examining of various things and came and nicked loads of strawberries while I was decorating her cake.

My Mum arrived at about 10ish bringing a T shirt, premium bonds and the pink MP3 player and docking station I’d chosen and ordered from Argos from my parents and brother. Ady and I had debated the pros and cons of cd player versus MP3 player and docking station thinking as she loves music she would get more out of the MP3, still be able to listen to audio books in bed and not have to have the piles of cds that a cd player would require. I found this one online and was slightly dubious about it’s quality etc. but it’s fab! It is indeed very pink (always goes down well here!), tiny but with excellent sound and dead easy to use. It has headphones for ‘on the road’ which she tested out in the car earlier and proved excellent, is easy to put in the docking station and has a little remote control for operating it which she loves. She is over the moon with it :).

Having scoured ideas of places to go locally in crap weather we went with the Sea Life Centre in Brighton, mostly through lack of other inspiration. It wasn’t cheap, despite finding a 20% off voucher code online it was still nearly £50 for the five of us but I’d say was worth the money as we all spent the whole 2 hours (and could easily have been there for longer) walking round in awe inspired wonder at everything. We’ve done sealife centres before – the one in Hunstanton, Blackpool Tower, a big one near Chester and the one in Southsea (not Sealife centres trade name but that sort of idea) but actually this was great. I reckon D and S were the perfect age to actually get something worthwhile out of it. The moody blue lighting that is a bit murky, crap for photo taking but very atmospheric helps a lot and they played lots of oceanic music to aid the mood too but it was all really good. There were crabs, seahorses, the usual variety of fish but the highlights were the (small) sharks, the rays and the GIANT turtles. Lots of pics on but here are a couple of faves:

And from a ‘hands on’ point of view the open tanks where we were encouraged to touch anenomes so they closed up round our fingers were just fab :). We finished there with a simulator type attraction of a submarine ride.

We exited out onto Brighton seafront where we blustered along back to the car before heading to the Marina for Traditional Birthday McDonalds 😉

We had a wander round the marina too ending up in the FREE Santa’s Grotto where Davies and Scarlett talked to the Big Man In Red about whether they had been good this year (yes), what they wanted for Christmas (DSs although I urged them to ask for world peace) and it being Scarlett’s birthday today. They got a gift each too and then we headed back for home.

Dad and Frazer joined us for the birthday cake:

along with much listening to the music I’d hastily loaded onto the MP3 player and getting the Fur Real cat to do stuff. They all left, the children had a bath, we had lots of cuddles and thanking for a fab birthday and then the children went off to bed.

It’s been a great day, Scarlett has had some fab presents, none of which will need to have large amounts of space made in our already overcrowded house to accomodate them, she’s had a day out, a huge great cake and well over 100 photos of the whole day taken to continue to mark her childhood milestones. 🙂