The highlight for us was the visit of my (alex) mom earlier this month. She was here for just over a week and we all had a great time.
She came armed with early birthday presents... note, anyone looking for presents for these kids might consider Playmobils. They are wildly popular among the younger set in this house.
We had some great dinners together. Ellie and Nico always wanted to sit next to Grandma, as close as humanly possible.
My mom showed us some high-end bottling techniques. The peach jam is sooooo good.
We visited our local botanical garden, the Bayard Cutting Arboretum. It's small but has some great features.
Including this turtle!
They had some beautiful old Japanese Maples.
There was a dahlia exhibit going on while we were there. I had no idea there were so many kinds of dahlias.
We also visited a pumpkin farm on the North Shore of the island. There are lot of these farms around, and most of them offer other entertainments for kids. We have learned by hard experience that the quality of the establishments vary, however. Fortunately this one was of the higher caliber.
They had a bounce-room...
...a haybale maze...
... and of course, loads of pumpkins.
A lot of the "farms" are just empty fields with a lot of pre-picked pumpkins strewn about on the ground. I fear this gives kids the impression that pumpkins magically materialize in such places... kind of defeats the purpose of exposing city kids to agriculture.
This place was a real farm, you had to saw or tear off the pumpkin from the stem. They also had lots of other types and colors.
The results were great!
Thanks for coming out, Mom! We hope to see you again soon!
3 comments:
It was SOOOOO fun!!! Can't wait to show up again.
Hey LRH - if you're bearing peach jam you're welcome at our place in Shanghai anytime!!
That cracks me up that some city slicker thought it would be a good idea to just heave some pumpkins into a random field and call it a pumpkin patch. Really inventive.
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