Chagall for Children

Since we bought a yearly pass, we go to the Children's Museum every time we visit La Quinta. There were two new exhibits since our last visit.  The first was the Chagall for Children exhibit. I really didn't know much about him, but I learned a lot. He used a lot of fantasy and color to express emotion in his paintings. There were probably 15 painting copies there, each with an activity. We stayed quite a long time in here.

Here Anna is trying to build the painting as seen through the window.

 They are pretending to be circus performers!

Flower arranging was fun!

You could build part of this house with blue Lincoln logs.

This was a Chagall relief with which the kids could make a rubbing. It did not work so well.

With this activity, kids could add different feathers to the tail.

Chagall started making stained glass windows later in life. The girls could rearrange the pieces to make their own.

This one had an interactive display with something like a Where's Waldo game. There was a lot to find in the painting!

I don't know what this other exhibit was really about, we kind of happened upon it. There seemed to be a lot of unrelated things, but I'm sure I just could not figure out the relationship.

They could make cars and race them.

I had to take a picture of this game as it was just on Survivor this season.

The highlight of the museum trip was finding a caterpillar outside on the grass!

Two days later our Chagall reading book was in the mailbox. Thanks Amazon!

An Early Easter

Over the weekend, Brittany and Joey visited us. We were able to celebrate a little bit of Easter with them for the first time.

It was Ben's first hunt and he wasn't really sure what he was doing. We put out some really easy ones for him.

These guys are pros.

A rite of passage is when the kids don't need you to play a card game. Slap Jack is pretty fun!

It was a short one-night visit as Brittany and Joey were on their was to see Dodgers spring training in Arizona!

The Living Desert...again

We love The Living Desert and usually go there at least once a year.



It has been really hot here in La Quinta so this time we bought tram tickets and rode to where we wanted to go.  The tram was the highlight of the trip!

We fed the giraffes some delicious carrots. 

Anna asked why their tongues were gray and she got an answer! It keeps them from getting sunburned since they are sticking them out all the time.

The petting zoo was full of goats that the girls got to comb.

We enjoyed the reptile show.

I let the girls go on the camel by themselves this year. So grown up!

Anna was SOO proud of herself that she didn't run screaming from the Easter Bunny. She has come a long way!

We rode the tram around the zoo just for fun, stopping for a ride on the merry go round.

This is a great place to visit, but next time we will wait for a cooler day.

Before We Left

We are in La Quinta right now. Before we left, we discovered this park that is much closer to our house than the one we usually go to. It's amazing that we didn't noticed it in the three years we have lived here!

This may be why...




This nice winding sidewalk takes you down down down to the park. So the park is really not visible from the street. Of course, this is one of the kids' favorite parts of the park!

While we were there, the kids kept telling me that we had been there before. I kept telling them we hadn't. Mia said, "It feels like we've been here."

When we got back home I told Dan all about it. "Oh yeah," he says. "I took the kids there last year with the neighbors." Oy vey.

Last year Anna really wanted to ride her bike without training wheels. We took them off and she tried and tried but couldn't do it. She just wasn't ready. Fast forward one year. We took them off again. At the high school track, she had one push and she rode almost all the way across the field. What a difference a year makes! And a child's development!

It was spring-like when I left Colorado on Tuesday. Now it's snowing. Sorry to have missed it...not.

Spring Time

The day after Paige's birthday we were still in Seattle until the afternoon, but Dan wasn't feeling well. The girls and I decided when in Seattle, do like the Seattleites. So we walked in a light rain to Whole Foods and bought food for the plane trip.

It was actually exhilarating!

When we got back the home the weather was spring-like. We went on our first hike of the season with Charlie.

This creek is very close to us and hardly anyone knows about it. So we were surprised that someone had built a fort since we were here last in the fall.

Mia pulled one of the boards off and tried to "surf" with it in the creek. She fell in.  End of hike.