Visiting the Seattle Aquarium and how I almost lost my mind (I mean, my camera)

Lately I feel like I've been truly losing my mind. And everything that I touch. Doesn't normally mommy brain disappear after 2-3 months? I feel like mine gets progressively worse over time. In the last few months I've been continually losing my car keys, glasses, Boba and have broken a cell phone (but been on and off without one for almost 3 months). A couple weeks ago I lost one of my most treasured possessions - my camera. I'm a photoholic, ask anyone who knows me, and to lose the memory card alone was just devastating. Because I know computers crash without notice, I've been in the habit of using the memory card on my dslr as a mobile external hard drive and have gotten lazy about uploading them onto the computer. I mean, what are the odds that I'll lose the camera, right? It's certainly not small like a cell phone. Well, friends, it happened, but this story has a good ending, so read on!

A few weeks ago we visited the Seattle Aquarium. I hadn't been there since high school and Penny loved our visit to the Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium shortly before Ruby was born (and we also visited the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach back in October, still working on the post for that one!) so we took a family trip and were tourists in our own backyard for a day. 

It's a relatively small aquarium, and on the day that we visited it was very blustery outside so we opted to run through a lot of the outdoor exhibits on our way to the next indoor area.

The main room has a lot of viewing tanks that draw childrens' attention. Penny's favorite was the touch a tank, where she got to touch starfish, urchins and other coastal tidepool creatures.

My favorite exhibit, which is a curiosity to all, was seeing the Giant Pacific Octopus. Most of the aquariums that I've visited have an octopus, but they always seem to be hiding. On this visit, the octopus was out in the open and there even was a volunteer standing next to her with tons of information. 

I loved walking around and showing the girls all the gorgeous colors that you can find throughout the different ecosystems that make up the Pacific Ocean.

You can kind of begin to see my love affair with my camera, right? Don't get my wrong, my cell phone camera does a great job for 90% of life. But these scenes require a little more firepower and I'm thankful to have my camera handy for them.

The last part of our visit was at their felt board area where Penny got to make her own ecosystems using the felt creatures. Somewhere between taking these pictures, playing with the felt, changing diapers and going to the car, the camera was set down and not given a second thought until we came home and I went to upload pictures for this blog post. 

We scoured the truck to see if somehow it was tossed in there without us thinking. It wasn't there. I contacted the aquarium, only to get the voicemail machine for several days. I even put out a lost ad on craigslist! I prayed and prayed that someone had found it, saw that the memory card was full of pictures of our family and turned it in at the front desk. It was a long shot, unfortunately there are people out there who would just call it "finders keepers" and take off with it. I think a week passed by and I finally reached out the the aquarium one last time via facebook.

This time I got a message back and they had my camera! Joy of joys! We picked it up and now I have these pictures to hold on to forever.

It was a close call. I've had this camera for over 5 years, it was a college graduation present from my parents and it's traveled the world with me - on our honeymoon to the Dominican Republic, our babymoon to Europe and everywhere in between. I was beside myself that in all the places that I've taken it, that it could have been lost so close to home.

What it comes down to is that even though we get bogged down in life because of that jerk who cut us off or that unapologetic glare from another shopper while you deal with your toddler's melt down at the grocery store, there is still so much good in this world. There are still people out there who when presented with an opportunity to get a nice camera for free they choose to do the right thing and help it find it's owner again. For all the less-than-helpful experiences I've had from strangers since becoming a mother, I've been met with ten times as many helpful ones.

Have you visited the Seattle Aquarium?

or

Tell me about a time when a stranger was kind to you!

See what zoos The Pierogie Mama has written about