Keniworth and Botanic Gardens

I'm sure you've had these moments. Or something similar. Morning. Breakfast eaten. Day stretches ahead open to a whim. SO you suggest an outing to see how interested children and significant other are. Screaming and crying commences.

All efforts to get reasonable behavior out of C7 failed. So C42 took C7 and put her on the porch and locked the door while the rest of us got ready. Yes, he locked her out of the house. But she knows the code so she could have gone around the house and get in the back door with the keyless entry, but didn't because .... the sky was cloudy.

Yes, her fear of weather was impeding her. But no matter, we were going, since we thought we might have an hour of dry and the rest of the day wet. In fact, I was hoping so because I wanted to finish watching The Sound of Music with the kids (but that treat had to be cancelled).

We quickly got ready, grabbed C7 a dress and shoes (yes, she was in pjs), and left the house. At which point C7 realized she could go to the back door but when I told her we were leaving she thought better of going back into the house and came with us.

We had a fine time once the screaming stopped. Kenilworth Gardens is somewhere C42 used to take the girls a lot on their Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. We haven't been for a while.

I didn't see much wildlife this time. Bugs. We heard a frog or two. We saw Herons about 1/4 mile away. And the flowers were dying. But the lotus are fascinating.

We saw the seedpods.





We saw exactly ONE Lotus flower.




We saw the dying leaves.




And we loved the leaves with water in them. The lotus leaves repel water, so it was fun to play with them. We spent a lot of time looking for the leaves we could reach without falling in.





We did manage to stay at Keniworth for about an hour, then it actually did start to rain. C7 ran under a tree for protection. Here she is kind of fearful, trying to stand up straight, and then Q5 joined:





In order to get back to the car we had to assess the situation.

E41: Is it raining?
C7: Yes.
E41: Is there lightening?
C7: No.
E41: Is there thunder?
C7: No.
E41: Are you melting?
C7: No.
E41: Can you manage?
C7: Yes.

Which she did. She managed by making a beeline for the ranger's building/museum. Without screaming or crying. See? Managing. But she did run the fastest and farthest Carter has ever seen.

I wasn't ready to go home so we went downtown to the Botanic Gardens. Actually, we were headed for the Natural History Museum and the American Indian Museum, but they started fighting about going to both. I think Q5 was upset that C7 said they could go to Q5's pick first, because she thought C7 would then insist we'd spent enough time there and would have to go to the other museum right away.

So I overrulled both options and we went to the Botanic Gardens. Nice as always.

Only one picture.




We were going to go to lunch downtown but they got themselves too wet and wanted to put on dry clothes. So we went home.