Annual Trip to Butterfly Pavilion

Before we headed out on our annual trip to the Butterfly Pavilion, someone lost her first tooth! With the girls eighteen months apart, there is always a loose tooth now.



As for Butterfly Pavilion, it's one of our favorite places. And when we get to go with these two guys, it's even better.

Mia is still the only one brave enough to hold Rosie. Actually, she is not really brave, she just loves bugs!

They were fascinated with the bee hive. You get to watch the bees go outside and back in through a clear tube.

Please turn and smile.

Please.

We got two to turn. Maks?

 Maksie?

Got it. Love Anna's eyes.

A new exhibit is worms, which were really beetle larva. You get to hold them and watch them bury themselves in dirt.

Until next year!

Polo Fields

While we were in La Quinta there was a huge snowstorm in Denver. Dan was supposed to come out and join us for the last four days, Thursday - Easter Sunday. But his flight on Thursday morning was canceled. There were no flights on Friday available for him and no flights for us to go home early. So we decided we wouldn't be seeing each other for Easter.

Then, on Thursday, I found one flight available for Dan. He was able to fly in Friday. He didn't get to play golf with our old neighbors but he got to be with us.

We were supposed to have a barbecue after golfing on Friday but after canceling it and then reinstating it, people had made other plans. So we took the kids over to the polo fields for dinner. It was a perfect fit! They were setting up for Coachella Music Festival and let all the kids play on the stage and with the chairs. Because the huge tents created a lot of shade, we could put our tables out anywhere on the lawn.

There were lots of kids to play with.

The food was really good! This is our homemade potato chip appetizer.

One family brought a soccer ball and goals and the kids all played a game.

I think this is going to definitely be a go-to dinner place for us.

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.