Thanksgiving Point

The week before school started, my sister decided to take her kids to the gardens at Thanksgiving Point and she invited us all to tag along. I think it was the first time ever that my two sisters with kids and I, as well as our mom, just went and hung out for a day.

The gardens were gorgeous. We had been told that we could start at the main entrance and then we would see a gate for the children's play area, where we intended to spend most of our time. Somehow we missed that, but ultimately I think it was for the best because we saw some beautiful areas that we wouldn't have visited.

Here are all of the kids at the beginning before any of them had started whining about the heat or being tired of walking or hungry or thirsty or wanting to swim. At this point the day was full of possibilities.
Kenna and Autumn sharing a flower. These two adore each other.
My favorite spot, The Secret Gardens:

This was the loveliest garden surrounded by a huge stone wall. If you didn't see the big gates tucked behind an arbor, you would miss the whole thing. It really was an enchanted little secret.

The man on the left in the blue shirt is just about to yell at Calvin for holding his hand against the fountain and stopping the spray. He yelled at each of our kids at least once for something.

Calvin and Miriam pretending to be caged animals.

We had intended to spend most of our time in the children's gardens which included a big Noah's ark water feature. Unfortunately it was "Two Dollar Tuesday," which means that every family in UT with a dozen kids brought their friend with her dozen kids to enjoy the discount. This meant that they had fenced off the Noah's ark and you had to have a wrist band and wait for your turn to play in it for 20 minutes. The problem was that each 20 minute turn only came around once every two hours. This would have been okay if we had gone there first as we'd intended, but the lady at the ticket counter gave us bad information, and by the time we got our wristbands, we had a two hour wait and we had already been wandering around for two hours in the heat. We decided not to wait for our turn. The kids were disappointed, but we found something else that was probably more fun than the fountain would have been.

The waterfalls:

Calvin about to pounce on a frog:
We were all hot and tired and slightly cranky in the end, but it was a lot of fun and we were glad to spend time playing with our cousins in such a beautiful place.

8/16