Day 1585. Sammy was up really early again. Eventually Randy got up to make them breakfast. I had my alarm set for 9:30, as I had a student at 10 am. After I got up and started getting ready, I found out that my lesson was canceled. I then did office work, while Randy took the kids downstairs. Eventually they returned upstairs, while I went to the kitchen to make lunch. After lunch they were on their tablets or playing. Then we started getting them ready to leave the house.
At 3:15 pm we left. I had wanted to take them to the aquarium for a long time, and now the time had finally come. We took two subways, and both were old trains, which upset Sammy. Then we still had to walk a little bit to get to the big building that used to be an air defense tower in WWII. We walked uphill on a street until we got to a staircase. Randy had to roll the wheelchair up that staircase, then we made it to the entrance of the building.
There was a long line of people waiting to buy tickets. Thankfully we had already bought tickets online in advance. I simply went to the front of the line, showed my tickets and Sammy, and the guy let us straight in. What a blessing! We went to the actual entrance inside the building, where they scanned our tickets, and then we were inside.
We walked around on the ground level, then walked to the elevator. We took the elevator to the top level, level 11, where we could walk outside and walk around the tower. We had a great view of the city up there. It was pretty high. Then we started going down, level by level. There was not that much too see on each level. There were fish, and there were reptiles. There were snakes and spiders, a crocodile and komodo dragon. And the kids were eager to see the sharks. They were not very big. We returned to the sharks just before 6 pm, when a diver was gonna go into the tank with them. That was probably the hightlight of our visit. The diver first petted the big sea turtle that was 47 years old and that they called the queen of the tank. Then he started looking everywhere for shark eggs and did find one. It was really funny, when he then started wiping the glass walls from the inside. The whole time there was a lady doing the narration; we couldn't actually see where she was. Eventually we walked away, as nothing else was happening.
We continued on to the last two floors we hadn't seen yet, then we were done. I hadn't been there in over 30 years, and so I didn't even recognize it at all any more. It was very well done for kids, and there were even places, where the kids could crawl into tunnels or inside squeres so that they were inside the aquarium. Even Sammy wanted to go inside one of those, and so Randy made it happen for him. That was the only time he had come out of the chair. On the whole, he was rather indifferent to everything that was there to see, and by the end he was really done and just wanted to go home. We had spent about 3 hours there.
We walked back to the subway, and this time both trains were new ones, much to Sammy's delight. By 7:30 pm we were back home. The boys had already eaten bread with salami on the road. I then warmed up some leftover soup that Tammy and Sammy ate, while Emmy had some fruit, as did the others. Then we washed them and got them ready for bed. I read them a story and prayed for them, then they went to bed. I climbed up into bed with Tammy and Emmy, who cuddled with me. Tammy was coughing pretty bad, so I got up again to give her cough syrup. Then I went to the kitchen to make my soup. Randy wasn't done eating, so it took a few more minutes to go sit with the kids; Emmy kept calling for him. After having eaten my soup, I went back to work. Tammy's sleep has been a little restless; she woke up crying because of a stuffy nose. That again.
