Sea World's Spooktacular

Last year, my mom and I took the boys to Sea World's Spooktacular for a little Halloween fun, but it wasn't all that great since we went in the morning before nap time and none of the Halloween stuff started until the afternoon. So this year, we decided to go in the afternoon and John said he wanted to come with us. Well, this was quite the proclamation since John is not a fan of theme parks, nor is he a fan of crowds... but since I take the boys there so often, he said he wanted to come and see what we do when we're there.

Turns out a lot of people had the exact same idea we did. There were HOARDES of people going to Sea World at the same time as us and, unfortunately, a lot of them needed tickets like John did. So, we stood in line.

And stood in line some more.

And stood in line some more. We were there for about 30 minutes before John FINALLY got to purchase a ticket... and that's when we found out that they weren't doing the Fun Card thing anymore. We were thinking that if John bought a full price ticket it could be used for a full year since we're SoCal residents. Negative, ghost rider. But by that point, we were sick of standing in line in the sun with hundreds of other people, so we coughed up the $65 (even WITH my discount) and went inside.

There were a few highlights (as can be seen below), but mostly the boys were irritated with the sheer amount of people at the park. They are used to having the run of the place since we usually go on weekdays, but it was very different on the weekend for Spooktacular. There were lots of tears when John had to explain to Johnny that he had to wait in line for his favorite things. And then we had to keep them close to us since they could get lost in the crowd. There was a particularly harrowing moment when my mom, John and I lost sight of Johnny at the Bay of Play. He went up the nets, across the bridge, down the slide, up the stairs... and then we lost him. Luckily, John found him trying to go down the nets (which you aren't allowed to do) and brought him back down safely.

So here are the pictures!

Johnny is obviously not impressed with the time and effort these people put into their make up and costume.

Hello rubber ducky. Would you like to come home with me?

Look! We were there!

ELMO!!!! Hank loves Elmo. But that's a post for another day. Or something.

Turns out that the coolest place in the park was this stretch of green grass where the boys ran and ran and ran while I chased them and tickled them. It was totally worth the price of admission. That grass was seriously soft.

I KNOW. Dead of cute.