Field trip!

We visited the Oregon Gardens in Silverton Oregon on Wednesday and had a LOT of fun! We picked up a friend and her wonderful little boy on our way. We had been worried about the weather because it's been storming for over a day and Julie our contact at the Gardens even called to warn me about high winds in the forest area, and electricity going on/off a few times, but we decided to go ahead and go and we could always do stuff inside instead of touring the garden.
Did we luck out!! Not only did it not rain while we were there, the sun actually came out a little as well! So we got to go out into the gardens with the kids.

 We had a nice small group, with some new people (and some friends of course!). They had all kinds of fun doing their "forest treasure hunt" and We even had a few foot races! We learned some different types of cones, how to tell how old tree's are, drew pictures of our favorite tree's and even make up scientific names to describe them. I have to say I love our friend Izzy's tree's! She liked the tree's that kind of looked like people so we decide to call them "humanus pineus"! After that we went to the rediscovery forest and got to explore "off road" and found animal tracks, mushrooms, ant homes, etc. LOTS of exploring to be had!
We also got to see some signs of spring.

I even found this cute little mailbox in the children's garden.

I sure wish I was talented enough to do one up like this for our house!
The kids had fun running around the children's garden discovering everything! We all want to go back again after things are really blooming and the days are a little warmer. What great fun! We did miss not being able to see the big fish in the ponds (they are still at their "winter home").
So today we are recovering. I'll finally sit down and look through the other books we received this week and start getting the rest of the Ancient Egypt stuff sorted to get started!

So we'll be talking about archaeology and Ancient Egypt and have some fun craft activities coming up soon too! Next week we have 4H and another short field trip, music lessons (the kids are starting to learn songs to do a small "concert" for people) and hopefully if the weather does get better they will have a fun play day to get some excess energy out!