More fun at the botanical gardens

Gregory and Emelia love butterflies. At the botonical gardens, they don't have a butterfly room like they did in Minnesota, but they do have a butterfly garden with plants that attract, well, butterflies. So we went there and we waited for some butterflies, and paused to pose for some pictures:


Emmie was having none of this posing business. In fact, whenever she saw the camera she would yell, "No!" and turn her face away so we couldn't get a picture. Like this:


So we had to sneak pictures of her:


The fun part of the butterfly garden for the kids is a little trail that takes you through all the flowers. Gregory likes to pretend it's a train track:


And Emmie like to imitate her brother:


There's a little kid's garden with stupid—uh, silly—things planted in the middle of the gardens. The kids seem to like it, except that there a train track that Gregory gets all excited about, until he realizes there's no train on it. (At least there hasn't been one when we were there. It's like they recently retired it or something.) So Gregory gets all excited and then sadly points to where the train should be:


Then he makes his sullen face:


and pouts for a few minutes:


Luckily for us, we found a way to make him happy again. First, we saw a couple of foxes in the gardens:


Then, in a decision I'm sure I'll come to regret, I thought, "Hey, maybe Gregory would enjoy taking pictures with our expensive camera." And boy did he ever. He laughed and laughed every time he took a picture, like this one:


That experiment ended when he decided to try to take a picture of the pond by holding the camera out over the water.

Then, on our way back to the entrace, we found the water fountain for the kids to play in. On Wednesday nights during the summer, the gardens have free jazz concerts, and this happened to be one of those nights, so the kids played in the water and danced to the music. When we first got there, the fountains were going on and off, shooting water into the air. Emmie loved it, so every time the water shot up, she would jump up with her arms in the air and say, "Up!" Like this:


Then she danced to the music:


We have discovered recently that Gregory really gets into jazz music. Watch him (and Emmie) dance to the music in this video: