By Karen

On Friday of this week, our family took a trip to the Vancouver Aquarium.  It happened that all four of us had a rare convergence of a day off work, school, etc, so we decided to go. 

What does this have to do with my daughter Miranda’s Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva, you may ask?  The answer is: pretty much nothing! Which is a very good thing…  What our family aims for is life in which FOP plays as little a role as possible in our day to day activities.  And, as Miranda grows older and more steady, more responsible for herself, more aware of what’s going on around her, etc, it becomes more and more possible to achieve our aim.

So anyway, this Friday…  My husband had to work in the morning, so the kids and I hopped in the car and drove downtown to pick him up.  He met us with Subway sandwiches in hand, which are a favourite of the Friz kids ;-).  We then headed off to the fabulous Vancouver Aquarium.  After snarfing down our sandwiches in the car, we headed in.

When you first enter the Aquarium, there’s a big foyer with a shiny stone floor.  This used to worry me when we visited the Aquarium (we have season’s passes, so do this fairly often) - I had nightmares of Miranda tripping and plowing herself face-first into the floor.  As I’ve commented before in this blog, I have a sort of ongoing phobia about Miranda tripping, because she did it SOOO often when she first became symptomatic with FOP.  But now that Miranda is almost 5 years old, her tripping frequency has reduced a great deal…  So much so that I’m even able to let Miss M walk WITHOUT HOLDING AN ADULT’S HAND (shocking!!) across the Aquarium’s floor. 

We flipped a coin to see what to go see first (aside - otherwise there would be a loud Friz-kids argument over this subject, sigh).  Miranda won the coin toss, so she picked the sharks and sea turtle tank.  They have a nice carpeted bench/ledge for kids to stand on at this tank, right next to it, so Pete hoisted Miranda up and plopped her on it.  As always, she was delighted with the sharks.

After the sharks, we headed into the Amazon rainforest exhibit, which has gorgeous parrots, turtles, fish and other animals.  In the forested terrarium, you have to look way, way up to try and spot the sloth, which always hangs from the ceiling.  This is a bit tricky for Miranda - she can’t bend her head backward much due to FOP neck fusions, so must bend at the knees and angle her whole body upward.  It looks awkward, but does the job.

After that, we went downstairs to look at Miranda’s favourites, the frogs, and then on to see the inside view of the dolphins.  Then we went outside for a bit to see the outside view of the dolphins, the sea otters and the belugas.

Silly me, I forgot my camera.  However, I did have my cell phone with me, so used that to snap a few pics.  Picture quality isn’t the best, my apologies.  Here’s the seal we saw, resting lazily on the bank of his enclosure…

And then the sea otters (Stacie Miller, this one’s for you!)…

I think the last thing we looked at was the new artic exhibit which surrounds the inside view of the beluga tank.  I wanted a pic of the kids near the beluga tank, and ideally near a swimming beluga, but neither the kids nor the whales would cooperate, imagine that.  However, I did get this nifty photo of the kids standing by a very life-like picture of a walrus…

And then the day was done, and we went home.  OK, so a few people looked curiously at Miranda’s headband, and her odd gazing posture, but apart from that, absolutely nothing connected to FOP happened.  Which is as it should be.