Playin' Hooky

So much for my goal of more consistent blogging....

We started out the week with Daddy home from school on Monday and Tuesday. He always takes the Monday after the play off as a mental health day. He certainly deserves it after spending basically every moment that he is awake at school for the week and weekend before. It was not a very relaxing Monday though - it was basically a repeat of the over scheduled Monday Madness of the week before. Since Tuesday was a teacher in-service day, he decided he still didn't feel well enough "cough, cough" to spend the day in meetings. It was a gorgeous day - sunny and about sixty something degrees. We decided to take Spencer out of school for the afternoon and pack up the kids and head to the Meijer Gardens to see the butterfly exhibit and spend some time kicking around in the children's garden.

I had a hard time getting any decent pictures of any butterflies. They seemed to really be moving a lot. Which is really cool for the kids to see, but hard to photograph. I didn't spend a lot of time trying to shoot them - unlike some people in there that were just sitting on the ground with their cameras aimed at a specific branch for minutes upon minutes of time.

Evan wanted so badly for a butterfly to land on him. He walked around with his arms outstretched the whole time.

I don't know if the kids were hot or what ( it was about 80 degrees and humid in the butterfly greenhouse), but they didn't seem to want to watch the butterflies for very long. They were all more interested in going out side.

Evan and Hailey playing in the beaver house. They would stay in there and play all day if they could.

They love the story time play hut as well. Since it has these windows, they like to pretend they are working at an ice cream place or McDonalds.

We spent a lot of time at the farm. We had never been to this exhibit before - I think it might be new (within the last couple of years anyway). It was so awesome. I bet it is amazing in the summer when the garden is growing. This is one of the kids' new favorite sculptures. They like how the boy is shooting the milk from the cow's udder right into the cat's mouth.

This water pump was part of the farm as well and I tell you, if I had one of these in my back yard, I would never, ever, see my kids. They played with this thing FOREVER! Spencer asked if we could make one at the cabin.

The farm was really cool. Can you believe that blue sky? Are we truly still in Michigan? In March?

Then we made our way back into the regular sculpture path to the giant horse. Can you see Spencer under the hoof trying to get the horse to step on him?

The hill that surrounds the DaVinci horse is one of the kids' favorite parts of the whole place. They run up and down this hill more times than I can count.

In the grotto looking for the dinosaur egg sculpture - another favorite. It was not there though. We are wondering if they remove it in the winter since it sits on the ground. In the summer the kids would not be able to stand where they are in this picture - their feet would be in the little waterfall.

Back to the Children's garden to hang out a bit in the sensory area. Spencer shows off his tongue impression.

The butterfly exhibit is called "Butterflies are Blooming". On the way out Evan asked me what blooming meant. When I told him, he scrunched up his face and said that they shouldn't call it that because butterflies don't really BLOOM! I told him that "Butterflies are Growing" or "Butterflies are Hatching" doesn't really have the same "ring" to it. He was not convinced.

This is always such a great place to go. I feel like the kids learn something new every time that we visit. I love how they are excited about cultural things that some people might think are boring. One of my favorite parts of the day was when Spencer noticed a new part of the park that was under construction last summer when we were there. That is pretty observant for an eight year old boy. Also when Evan saw a new sculpture in the park and was completely overflowing with excitement about it. A new sculpture! A new sculpture! And he used the word sculpture - not statue or rock thing. Sculpture.

I would say it was a day worth playing hooky.