We asked kids to review the aquarium and here's what we discovered.

When I was seven, I had a close encounter with a shark.

It was on my first-ever visit to an aquarium.

In as much as a seven-year-old can dine out on an experience – eg: regale their small and equally unworldly friends over milk-based drinks in the school yard – I lived off it for months, if not years.

“And there’s this HUGE tank, and a shark just came up and swam PAST MY FACE! It was THIS FAR from my eyes!” It completely overwhelmed me. I embellished the tale, with stories of me, just casually chatting to my brother when A SHARK SWAM PAST MY FACE.

Childhood outings still loom large in adult memory. Maybe it was the first time you saw an actual Mummy at a museum, and realised that was what they did with DEAD PEOPLE. Maybe you spent an inordinate amount of time waiting for the crocodile to blink to show you that yes, he was REAL, not plastic. Maybe you saw a piece of art that you have never forgotten.

Maybe your memories about your day out just was about the boy you saw on the bus journey there, and the ice-cream afterwards, and the time you spent listening to a parent trying to make themselves sound more knowledgeable than they were.

Maybe you only remember the tantrum you threw when you didn't get what you wanted in the gift shop at the end of a long trip.

Maybe. But you remember that you went. As wonderful as lying on the lounge watching TV is, holidays are not entirely horizontal affairs.

Now, I am a parent. And my kids are every bit as excited by sharks swimming past their faces as seven-year-old me.

They are also entirely enthralled by the fact dugongs fart (there's a helpful push-button sound effect for that), and that they look exactly like smiling, beatific mermaids, at least if mermaids looked like very relaxed, swimming cow-elephants.

And they are excited to know that Nemo lives in the same country as them, and that plastic bags in the ocean are the enemies of all animals, and that there are crayfish as big as small dogs - in SYDNEY HARBOUR.

These are the facts my kids took away from a day out at SEA LIFE Sydney Aquarium, the kind of aquarium that would have blown my tiny seven-year-old mind. Because here, they don't just have a tank with a staircase built around it, where the sharks of my childhood fantasies taunted me through the glass.

At the place my kids go these days there are interactive displays that teach you the exact pressure count of a great white's bite.

There's now an entire Jurassic Seas exhibit about dinosaurs - they must know my son - that illustrates just how little, and how much - the world has changed in 65 million years. At my kids' aquarium, there's a place were you can draw a picture of a fish, and a few moments later, you can watch as your drawing flips and swims and twirls in real time on a virtual Great Barrier Reef.

There's a pool full of critters you can touch, and there are glass floors, and lettuce cafes for the mermaids dugongs.

They can (and do) spend hours there, not having any idea that every tank and every floor and every button they press is laying down memories and seeding knowledge. To them, it's fun. To us, it's a day out with benefits.

And my children seem much more confident in their knowledge about the world than I ever did.

My daughter at six is like a sponge - so the aquarium is the perfect place for her - and takes every opportunity to show off how much she knows.

My son, meanwhile, wants to take every opportunity to prove that at just 3, he's no longer "little" and not at all scared by the sharks, or the giant rays, or the crabs. He's endlessly wowed by the fact that from inside one tunnel, you can see the saw fishes "smiling" faces, and that Dory is real, and she's swimming around, forgetting things, right IN FRONT OF HIS EYES.

Peeling ourselves from our holiday comfort zone to spend a day at my kids' aquarium is like taking a short holiday from their real lives to look into a world they can only imagine.

The ocean might surround the city they live in, but what lies beneath is a constant wonder.

And they will be dining out on it for ever.

What do your children enjoy at the aquarium?