Botanical Gardens: Everything but the graduation pictures

As I suspected, the playground at the botanical gardens was a huge hit with the kids.

They had all sorts of nets to climb on and wooden structures to climb.

Those mushrooms that Alexander is banging on are musical mushrooms that make different kinds of sounds when you drum on them. Benjamin is hopping from log to log...

Here's Phoebe climbing into a tunnnel:

The slide is metal and the kids found it a little difficult to go down. They kept ping-ponging from side to side.

Here's Phoebe after she climbed on top of a giant acorn:

All the while, Andrew and Miriam were off posing Rachel and taking pictures of her. It was a pretty great set up for us because the kids weren't just sitting around bored while we took Rachel's photos, though I did eventually drag them away from the playground so we could explore some other areas of the gardens.

When she realized that we were taking pictures, Phoebe couldn't understand why we weren't specifically taking pictures of her. I mean, what's so special about Rachel, anyway? Phoebe kept trying to inch in on the frame, giving us her sweetest little smiles, hoping for the camera to capture her brilliance.

Here Andrew had asked Rachel to "take ten steps backwards," so Phoebe—feeling particularly compliant because she still was convinced that we had the wrong subject in front of the camera—also started taking ten steps backwards.

Here's a picture of Rachel, Andrew, and Miriam (and Alexander), where they were taking pictures of Rachel by a bush while the rest of us tried to entertain Phoebe over by the fountain in this courtyard.

 Not that she's entitled or anything, but when Phoebe saw the fountain she immediately sat down and started pulling off her socks and her shoes.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"I'm going wading in that fountain!" she said.

"No, you're not," I said. "That's against the rules."

"Oh, man!" she moaned. "But why? It's not a bog or a pond!"

We'd read this sign earlier, which explicitly states that ponds and bogs are off limits. It said nothing about fountains.

At least we know she's capable of following rules (and the children's garden has what they call a "runnel," which is a little...gutter...running through part of the garden where wading is encouraged, so she got to do that a little later in the day).

Here's Rachel after noticing a caterpillar friend was crawling around her robes:

I ended up having to peel it off of her because Benjamin was afraid of its little hind prolegs, which are used to grip things with velcro-like crotchets. He thought he was going to pull the caterpillar apart, trying to pull it from Rachel's robes. Somehow (?) I still have the most experience playing with caterpillars, so I coaxed it off of Rachel and then gave it to Benjamin, who put it on a plant (that probably wasn't supposed to have a caterpillar on it, but that's okay—like, I mean, they say they're all about pollinators and have butterfly gardens so they're probably planning on having a least a few caterpillars around...and yet they were also treating flower beds with pesticides so...I dunno).

Here's Alexander, who had a bunch of angry ants attack him while we were taking pictures elsewhere. The ants weren't initially angry, but Benjamin decided to stomp on their ant hill while Alexander was in the vicinity and...while Benjamin had plans for getting out of their target zone, Alexander was a little less prepared. But he survived.

It's a good thing they love each other, right?

I'm so nervous for this changing dynamic. My friend (who is due with a baby on Rachel's due date, actually) asked me how I felt about things and I told her I was actually feeling about as nervous about Rachel leaving the house as I was about bringing a new baby home. This is my friend's fourth baby after quite a bit of a gap between her now-youngest and this baby. She's pretty stressed out trying to rearrange the house to make room for the baby. 

We're not quite making room for a new person, but we're trying to plan for how we'll function without Rachel being a daily fixture in our home and...it's difficult. Who will share rooms with who? How often should we call her so we're not overbearing but she knows that we care? How will Rachel and Miriam–the dynamic duo of nearly 16 years—cope being apart from each other for an indeterminant timeframe? 

We're going to miss Rachel a lot...and it will require a lot of adjusting once she leaves. But, it will be good for her to strike out on her own. And I know (being quite a bit younger than my older siblings) that our family will forge through it and figure out a new way of being us.

But, man—this feels like the first fatal flick that sends a trail of dominoes toppling. Before we know it all those dominoes we spent so much time setting up will just be helter-skelter all over the room (or world). And that's okay, I think.

We like to tell our kids that a lot of what they do in life is ephemeral. 

Because that's a word that you should always use with your toddlers. 

What that means is, for example, that if they build something really awesome with something—Magnatiles, Lego, blocks, whatever—it...can't last. Eventually it will need to be dismantled and put away so that someone else can build something new with it later.

I don't really believe that families are ephemeral—because I believe in eternal families, see?—but I think each moment is a bit ephemeral. And right now I'm feeling like little-kid Rachel was some ephemeral thing that I couldn't keep forever in my living room...

But that's okay, because once that trail of dominoes falls over you get to start building something new with the pieces, right? The pieces are all still there...they're just...arranged differently...and I think it will be okay...even if it's not easy to watch the dominoes fall. 

We'll build a really cool castle or something, okay, guys?

At least these little dominoes are going to stick around for a while:

Here are some pretty amaryllis flowers: 

And some allium...

The bulb gardens were lovely, but I really liked the field of poppies. The kids asked if we were going to get tired walking through it (because that's what happens in The Wizard of Oz).

Benjamin and Phoebe wanted a picture together

She has such a big smile...and such an odd habit of tactilely checking to see whether or her smile level is appropriate. So here she is with her hand coming down from checking:

And here she is with Alexander, busily checking to see if her teeth are out:

If you see any pictures of her with her hands up by her face, just know she's been busy assessing her grin-level.

This was a fun moment...

Zoë and Alexander both wanted to take pictures with Phoebe as well and there was some, uh, miscommunication about who should get the next "turn" with her (because—you know—she's a prop, not a person, obviously).

I joked the other day about my sister Abbi, who was awfully cranky sometimes...so much so that she earned the nickname "Crabby Abbi"...and...I dunno...that was probably pretty mean of us. Like, that's worthy of being a villain origin story, probably. But also she could have been a bit...nicer.

We could all be a bit nicer, probably. 

Here are the kids being nice again...

And here's Rachel, having removed her robe, taking a few pictures with Miriam:

And here are the kids exploring the boardwalk:

And apparently this is a "trendy" thing young people do...take .5 pictures of each other. They zoom their phone cameras out and then angle steeply downwards from their foreheads to catch the most ridiculous angle of themselves. So here's Miriam:

And here we are making our way back through the gardens to spend more time at the children's garden before leaving:

I walked the littler kids down to play while Andrew took the big girls to the car to fetch our lunch (peanut butter sandwiches, of course!) and water bottles.

Phoebe enjoyed these mushroom misters until she was thoroughly soaked.

Alexander thought these twisty seats were amazing—they would spin forever once they started going!

Here he is trying to walk after getting out:

They had a cave to explore, as well as a root-system room...

Benjamin really wanted some pictures of himself on this bridge:

And here we are finally heading back to the car to head to campus for Daddy's meeting: