Friday, April 19, 2024

Friday: Fredrick Meijer Gardens

Today I went on a field trip with Joshua to Fredrick Meijer Gardens.  It was a bit cold out, and I didn't really enjoy the driving, but it was otherwise a lovely day.

There were plenty of chaperones, so all the adults only had one or two students with them.  I had Joshua, obviously, and his friend Ben.  Ben has been in my field trip group before and he's a great kid.

We got there no problem.  Besides the guided lesson we could choose what we wanted to look at so we started with the arid plants.  The butterfly area was looking a little full, so we decided to come back later.  We went outside and walked around the pond and farm areas.

Then it was time for the guided lesson.  It was on adaptations, especially of butterflies.  It was ok.  It was probably age appropriate but I was a bit bored.  Lunch was next.  Joshua and I were both hoping for an inside lunch but they had us in an outside pavilion.  When we sat in the sun it wasn't too bad, but it wasn't very warm either.

After lunch we were going to go in the butterfly room but the line was really long.  Dealing with plans changing was probably one of my favorite parts about these two kids...they decided that the line was too long so we should do something else and they were both fine with that.  Ben really wanted to get to the Japanese garden because he and his mom had been talking about the cherry blossoms.

The problem was that we didn't know what a cherry blossom looked like.  So we took several pictures of not-cherry blossoms.  I also took some of Joshua.




Eventually we actually found some cherry trees and it was a happy time.

After the Japanese garden we went to the children's area.  We went through the hedge maze, but the treehouse was declared too busy.  We decided to go look at the art exhibit in the building for the last 15 minutes.  However, the butterfly line wasn't long any more!  So we snuck in there for about 10 minutes.  The whole afternoon was great, but I really do like the butterflies.  (At the same time, 10 minutes was about right.)  No butterflies landed on us, although we tried really hard.

The traffic leaving the gardens was absolutely terrible.  But we made it without incident.

Grey Bear's bad part of the day was that Joshua didn't bring him to the gardens to recreate an old picture.


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