Only a daddy

This coming weekend our family is going to go to Singapore for a few days. Long boring story, but it relates to our visa status here. In preparation for this trip, we were planning what things we wanted to do over the weekend there. There is an aquarium there that is apparently quite nice, and one of the things you can do there is to ‘swim’ with dolphins. This is an educational thing where you learn about dolphins up close, and are allowed in to the water to some degree with them in the process of learning up close.

When I mentioned to the kids there was a place to swim with dolphins, they were very excited. They then took off on a story of how this would all work. Here is there version of events to come.

“Daddy will swim out in to the sea and try to find some dolphins. He has to learn to speak Dolphin in order to be able to convince the dolphins to come to the beach so we can play with them. If he sees a shark, he will have to swim ‘jet-fast’ to get away, and try to find a dolphin to help him. If a shark comes while he is riding on a dolphin, then the dolphin has to jump high, ‘cause they can jump higher than sharks to keep daddy safe.”

While the above plan seems sound to a 5 and 7 year old, there are several parts that are worrisome to me. 1) Swimming in to the open sea is a bit scary. I like swimming, but open water is a different kind of swimming than High School Swim Team. 2) Leaning to speak Dolphin is not going to be easy. There are likely not as many ‘Learn to Speak Dolphin in 30 Minutes’ courses as there are for other languages. 3) Sharks? Ummm, about that . . . . . . . . .

When asked why mommy can’t be the one to implement the above plan, the kids response was that only daddy’s can speak Dolphin. How silly of me. I should have known.

So, we will see how the weekend goes.