Feeding Turtles

When I was on a “vacation on a vacation” with my 6 year old daughter E and 4 year old son C, we needed to wait about another hour before dinner. I was already pretty hungry and tired from the day, but everyone was getting in late, so we had to wait. I could have went the easy route and hung out in the hotel room while giving the kids tablets. I did not want to actually do that though, so off we went exploring the property.

My best friend said that there was a pond behind one of the buildings with ducks. That seemed like something my kids would be interested in so I planned to look for that pond after walking around the facilities. It was a nice walk and there were some things to look at, but E said she was getting tired (probably from climbing all those stairs for the water slide). We ended up walking back towards where our room was and looked for the pond with the ducks.

To our disappointment, there were not actually ducks there. We didn’t really see anything at first. We had to walk pretty far to the side of the pond and I saw a bird that kind of look like a duck. We ended up walking towards the bird so the kids could get a better look. They started to get bored really quickly and we only spent about 25 minutes out of the hour we needed to wait before dinner.

I was running out of ideas, but luckily some turtles save the day. I noticed one turtle climbing up to shore. The kids noticed too, and started to stare. Then, a few more turtles started to swim towards shore. They all attempted to climb up, and sometimes it was really difficult for the smaller turtles. All of a sudden, there were more than a dozen turtles all around the area where me and the kids were.

E and C were so excited! They’ve seen turtles, but never so many and up close. We didn’t have any food for them, but we just stood there and admired them. They started getting closer and closer to the turtles. The turtles didn’t seem to be scared though. They seemed like they wanted some thing. My kids spent so much time just looking and interacting with the turtles, but eventually I wanted to look around more.

That’s when I saw that this was a turtle feeding area. You could get some turtle food from the front desk of the hotel if you had some tokens. I didn’t really know where to get tokens from, so I decided to rally the kids and head to the front desk to figure it out. When we got there, I had the kids ask about the turtle feedings because it was something they wanted to do. I didn’t want them to just rely on me all the time. I want them to be comfortable talking to grown-ups and voicing what they want. Even though they are already getting better and better at it, more practice couldn’t hurt.

The front desk ended up just giving us some turtle food. The kids were so excited and we ran back to the turtle feeding area. It seemed like the turtles were also excited. My kids rationed out the food and fed the turtle slowly to make the food last.

We also saw a baby turtle that was super tiny. The baby was scared to get close, but would explore close to the shore near where other turtles were. C ended up figuring out how to toss the food near the baby and to make sure the baby turtle saw the food before it sank. There were a couple kids feeding the turtles at this point, but he was the only one that successfully fed the baby!

I’m really glad that me and the kids spent time together instead of being in the hotel room with the tablets. It’s easy to get sucked into screen time. If we ended up doing that, we wouldn’t have a chance to see all of those awesome turtles. The kids also had so much fun and I’m sure they’re going to remember that for a long time. That night when we went to sleep, they wanted to make sure we fed the turtles before we left the next day. I promised that we would and put them to bed because they were exhausted. So was I.