An inspirational outing

A weekend ago we went to this really awesome park. Actually it's a few parks in one area. There is a wild life sanctuary with a boardwalk, a fragrance garden and an old homestead park with animals and gardens, plus it's right next to a river. If it was closer to us we would be there all the time! I got some serious inspiration from the gardens, the fragrance garden as well as the vegetable gardens at the other park. It was a beautiful warm day and we spent the whole day there. We also met up with family as well. Neenee {grandma} Aunties and a niece. So fun!I must have this in my garden.

And this.

I am all about organic gardening and adjusting tolerance levels, but this sign cracked me up! There were NO plants there. If you are going to place a sign advocating this sort of gardening at least have a healthy looking plant by the sign!

Because dry empty dirt does not get the right point across I do believe.

Smelling the flowers.

Auntie Rissa! Lala loves her auntie I promise, she is just focusing on those sunglasses. She was waiting for her moment to seize them off her face, and or put her fingers all over them. She's crafty like that.

Board walk fun. The kids loved this walk, I was a little nervous myself and praying the whole time one of them didn't stumble or step off in their excitement. It wasn't all that deep, just nasty.

Can you tell I'm exhausted already? And it was still before noon. We didn't leave the park until close to 6 pm. It was a looooonnnnggggg day.

My little explorers.

Had to get a picture of the boys on this pig bench, they loved it.

I am going to do my new garden beds {where the pond use to be} like this. It's a four by four foot bed split up into one foot squares with string so it looks like a grid. They were amazing. This type of compact planting fits a ton of vegetables into a really small space. Exactly what I need!

The kids loved the animals. I was a little sad and shocked that there wasn't very many animals at this park anymore {and just by the condition of the fragrance garden and park in general}. I use to go to this park as a kid and they had so many more animal, plus the park was obviously taken better care of back then. With all the cuts in budget and stuff this park has really suffered. Still a cool place, but it really has been neglected over the last 20 years. A volunteer at the fragrance garden told me that the garden is pretty much only run by volunteers at this point. If I lived closer I would most definitely want to be one of those volunteers. I couldn't help but think about all the stuff I would love to do to fix up the garden as I was walking through.

Cousins! These two are just the cutest. They were looking a wild birds, since there were no other animals in this pen. Leiella is still calling most birds spooky or spooky eagles {ever since the baby crow incident}. After the fragrance garden, the boardwalk and the park we decided that it was just too hot and headed down to the river.

Lala sat down in this pud puddle before I could even get her swimsuit on. Ahhhhhhh refreshing!

Rivers make me nervous so they were only allow to put there toes in, but it was enough to cool off. They still had tons of fun in the sand and squishing in mud puddles.

These two were just plain adorable as usual. Some how they ended up both wearing green sunhats and pink swimsuit and they were just too much!

Love.

So there you have it, I managed to drowned you once again in pictures. And believe it or not... I am still not caught up with my posts. Good Grief.