Dubai

The boys had a day off school last week, so we decided to head to Dubai for the long weekend (which also happened to be our 9th wedding anniversary).  We stayed in the amazing Atlantis Palm Resort.  It's the man made islands in the shape of a palm tree.  The hotel was stunning!  It included a huge water park, aquarium, dolphin bay, and 20 restaurants.  It was amazing!

Atlantis Palm Resort - Dubai

 

Glass sculpture in the lobby.
Everything was so decadent!

Boys upon arrival

Our hotel room had 2 wooden panels separating the bathroom from the bedroom.  The boys like taking a bath with the doors open and the TV on ... they could watch cartoons while taking a bath!  :-)

 
The boys (Ken included) loved watching all the fish in the giant fish tank on the way to the water park.  And we all loved the lazy river!!  Coolest lazy river ever with lots of rapids!!  So fun!!

 

Boys enjoyed all the kid slides and can't wait to be tall enough for the adult water slides.

 

 

Pictures don't do this fish tank justice!  Or I should say, OUR pictures don't do this fish tank justice!  We could have stared at the fish in this tank forever!!  It was ridiculous how many fish, sting rays, and sharks were all together in one giant tank.  It was pretty amazing!!

 

 

 

The Lost Chambers Aquarium ... a small aquarium, but many amazing tanks!

Looks like a poster of jellyfish behind Nicholas, but they were very much alive in the tank!

So many beautiful colors!!

 

We spent a small fortune and decided to swim with the dolphins.  The boys loved getting to touch, pet, kiss, and play with the dolphins.  Since you can't take pictures in the water, they provide a photographer to take pictures while you're playing with the dolphins.  For an extra charge (of course), they give you a cd with all your images.  Money well spent to capture the memories, right??  Sure!!  Except they gave us the wrong cd!!

We didn't even know it until Jaden told us!  He was so excited to take the cd to school to show his friends our pictures - I hadn't had a chance to check the images first.  He came home from school and told me the pictures aren't us.  Really?  Sure enough!  I checked the cd and it's definitely not us!!  Luckily there was an online back up, so we were able to retrieve and download from the website.

 

 

Poor Nicholas was too short to be seen behind the fin!