Mom brought a new puzzle for Megan to play with; it's a set of Eric Carle zoo puzzles with four different animals from his book "1, 2, 3 to the Zoo". Megan really likes to work the puzzles, although she needs a lot of help with the 12 piece puzzles still. Then Grandpa and Amelia invented a game where Grandpa tried to work the puzzle in the air, and Amelia tried to jump up and get the puzzle away from Grandpa. It turned into a bit of a matador type event, with a lot of hysterical laughter.
Amelia has been really into playing dress-up lately, and she convinced Grandma to wear the one adult sized dress-up dress we own. The girls really like to hide underneath the dress, like the old lady in the Nutcracker.
And of course there was a lot of tickling and book reading. Grandpa teased Amelia by reading all the books like he was actually reading "Brer Rabbit", which drove Amelia crazy! She knew right away that he wasn't reading the correct words. Amelia decided that she would rather have Grandma read books that day because Grandma would read them right. Megan was perfectly content to have Grandpa recite "The Tar Baby" while looking at the pictures of "Biscuit's Day on the Farm."
On Monday morning we went to Olbrich Botanic Gardens; we had never been there with Grandma and Grandpa before. Amelia loves to explore all the different paths, and is getting better at knowing which paths lead where. She particularly liked the path around the pond and over the bridge, and she took all of us on it individually before we moved on to the birch garden. On that day, she was looking for paths in the shade, because it was pretty warm and sunny. We went to the shade garden first, and Grandma and the girls picked out their favorite variety of coleus. I was amazed by how many different kinds they had:
I'm including a photo of the bird we saw at the pond, because Dad wanted to look at his bird book to see what kind of bird it is:
We saw these huge trumpet-like flowers (Dad says it is a jimson weed) and Amelia pretended to play them like a trumpet:
Then Amelia and Grandpa hid on a bench in a shady garden while Megan, Grandma and I looked all over trying to find them. Eventually I heard Amelia shouting "Grandma, Grandma!" and I followed the sound of her voice to their hiding place. Apparently she was a little worried that we took so long to find her.
I managed to get one photo of the girls together in front of the flowers in the purple annual garden:
Megan was a little tired at lunch one day, but Grandpa got her to cheer up by singing "A carrot is a yum-yum vegetable, I eat them whenever I am able. Hey, what's up doc?" in his best Bugs Bunny voice and then crunching his carrot. Megan thought that was just the funniest thing ever, and she wanted to eat every single one of her matchstick carrots while Grandpa was singing the song. A few days later, she is still saying "Grandpa SONG!" when I try to get her to eat carrots.
Grandma and Grandpa helped Amelia practice her early math skills using snow peas at lunch. You can't really tell from this photo, but she was enjoying grouping the peas into even groups, then eating one and working out how to regroup them.
The girls also played in the pool, since it has been in the 90s the last few days. Grandpa showed them how to put the hose at the top of the slide so that they could slide down a water slide, and Amelia thought that was just great.
We had a really nice visit, and we were all sad when Grandma and Grandpa had to go home.
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