Please shut up!: My fun day with Jackson

It started first thing this morning - well if you don't count the little battle of wills that went on getting him into the shower first - and we went to his favorite restaurant Bob Evans for breakfast where he just about died and went to heaven with the ability to dip his french toast into whipped cream.

We headed from there downtown while he continued to quiz me with his Wimpy kid book questions to the aquarium. I tried and tried to get some nice pictures of him at these places but my camera shy little boy made that darn near impossible. We started almost immediately in the 4D Polar Express experience. It was fantastic though I have no idea what it has to do with aquatic things you expect to find in an aquarium!!! If you've not seen a 4D movie they are great fun; in addition to the 3D thing going on with the glasses you get poked in the back when the big pole comes towards you and water squirts you in the face if someone on screen sneezes and you smell chocolate if someone's drinking hot chocolate - so fun. The whole theater was just having fits of laughter (well except the really little kids who were screaming in terror but they were quickly removed so all was well).

We moved from there and explored "Australia" which Jackson particularly loved - lots of cool snakes and lizards in addition to all the fish. Then we went into the normal aquarium exhibits and saw lots of sharks and a big huge turtle we named Hugh to make it easier for us to talk about him. You can see the main tank from a lot of different places so we were always tracking Hugh. (as a side note: my dad can't say Hugh - he can't say the H sound when it's followed by a U sound so it comes out as "you" - it always makes me laugh. He can say "H" and "YOU" but not "HUGH" - he clearly didn't watch enough Sesame Street).

Once the Dolphin show was over we hit the souvenir shop and picked up Bailey (named after one of the dolphins) he's a monkey with a National Aquarium sweatshirt on.. (of course he is). Jackson was done with the fish and wanted desperately to paint pottery which was definitely on the weekend agenda, though I was thinking we'd do it on Sunday. But no, we headed over there and he made two penguins one in Steelers' colors with a 7 on the back named Ben and one with Redskins' colors with number 17 on the back named Jason - he did a great job and I totally forgot to take any pictures.

Finally done with the pottery (my little vase which will be a gravy boat of sorts took much longer than Jack's things) Jackson begged me to go back to Bob Evans for a repeat of his breakfast. He wore me down and back we went. Throughout the day I tried to take pictures of Jackson but he thwarted me at every turn. I caught him once, and finally at the end I convinced him to pose with his new friend Bailey. Here are some pictures of our day.

I love this kissy fish but I swear I've seen him before - can someone tell me where. I'm thinking he's maybe the narrator of a Disney cartoon my kids used to watch or something like that.