Botanical Gardens

This experience made me feel jipped that I haven't discovered this place before! Obviously it is a beautiful place to look and glean ideas from for our own garden but it has a wonderful children's area too. Some little girl said "oh it's just a bunch of flowers". If you are thinking the same, let me show how wrong that is---check it out:
Jordan figured out the sundial really quick. I don't think I have seen one in a long time. Cool.

I couldn't resist taking a picture of this--chocolate mint? I never knew....haha

Jordan took these pictures of these flowers and I thougth they were great. If you look close you can even see a dragonfly in each picture. I guess I'm not the only one interested in photography right now:)

This was so neat because we just drove by a real lock up near Nauvoo on the Mississippi River. We even talked about stopping someday and letting the kids watch how it works. Here the kids could manuever the boat through the channels and the locks to get the boats downstream. I LOVE hands on!




Haley being the general store "keeper"
Do you think if I push this lever I'll get wet??
Not only did we get to visit this cool place, we got to do it with our good friends the Ellingsons!!

Busy bees

I did not set this picture up--I just turned around and there she was being a beautiful butterfly:)
Haley the tree with an animal visiting.
This maze was really fun for the kids to play in. However, with every adventure we had to have some kind of "real" expereince. I noticed Haley wasn't wearing her glasses all of the sudden. Oh yeah...totally lost them in this maze. We searched for a good 30 min. no joke. And other people started helping---this one dad got his teenage girls and said "ok we're going to do a community service project and help find this little girls glasses. Well...we didn't find them and the kids were done. So I decided to leave my name at the front desk and hope someone would find them. We were heading out and I though "I'll just go look AGAIN where the stroller was and I looked and strated to turn back when something made me look again:

Look closely---I spy......Haley's glasses! Can you see them? Amazing they would land in the flowers that were EXACTLY the color of her frames. Truly an answer to prayer that I found them!