The Garden

Today we went to one of our favorite little getaway spots here in L.A.: the Huntington Gardens in Pasadena. We are members and we love strolling through the Desert Garden and letting the kids run like crazy through the giant fields and talking to the lion statues that guard the entrance to the Japanese Garden. Today we visited the brand new Chinese Garden that has been under construction for quite a while. It was beautiful, and the kids especially loved all the water and bridges.

Favorite moments from the day include:

Mercy carefully laying Camelia flowers on the paws of the two lion statues that stand at the back entrance to the Chinese Gardens, and gently asking for permission to enter;

the lady who stopped and offered me her tweezers to remove the cactus spines that were stuck in my pants from walking too close to the edge of the path in the Desert Garden;

finding a “hairy” cactus and a bunch with bright red “tongues” sticking out;

Aaron demanding to be carried through the Camelia garden because he was afraid of the tigers (???);

the kids spotting the “green Valley” and running toward it with all their might;

walking past a collection of nude male statues as part of a large group of people and having neither Mercy nor Aaron make any reference to their anatomy.

And my all time favorite moment (in that “is it bad that I am totally laughing at this?” kind of way): Mercy was running downhill on the path that led to the Chinese Gardens when all of a sudden she face planted in the dirt. She cried for a second, and was mostly just upset that the flower she had been carrying had fallen from her hands when she fell. She got right up and we were about to resume walking when all of a sudden she cried out again: “Mom, help!”

She was wearing a new pair of boots today that we got as part of a set of used shoes we bought on Craigslist last week. They are brown suede with fur lining and long laces with brown furry pom-poms on the end. I looked and saw that a pom-pom from her left boot had wound around a pom-pom from the right one, and her boots were now tied together and she couldn’t walk. Her fall suddenly made a bit more sense, and I laughed hard as I unwound my daughter from her predicament.