Gonna Make This Garden Grow: Brookside Gardens

We've visited the trains and playgrounds at Wheaton Regional Park before, but hadn't yet made it next door to see Brookside Gardens.  So one morning last week, we packed up our snacks and headed out.   Mom promised a stop at Starbucks along the way, but our local ones were jam packed.  Assuring us that there would be a Starbucks close by, we made our way to Wheaton.  Only to find that the closer we got, and the more loudly mom shouted at Siri to "show her a Starbucks on the way!", there in fact was not a Starbucks close by.  There were many, as I continued to point out, McDonalds close by.  Mom finally acquiesced and we pulled in to get mom her coffee.  Seeing as we were getting shortchanged on our chocolate milk, I attempted to negotiate a "healthy" lunch by telling mom that it was OK as long "as you don't eat it all the time.  and get fruit."  Mom said it was 9:23 a.m. and there was no way I was getting lunch from McDonalds.  At least I scored us some frozen lemonade, which we ate as soon as we got to the gardens.

Mom intended to stop first at the butterfly exhibit, but once Cam and I spotted all those nicely manicured gardens and people strolling quietly along garden paths, we knew what we had to do.  Run at mach 2 speed screaming and yelling at the top of our lungs, obvi.  We spent a fair bit of time in the children's garden (although this too was pretty manicured and didn't invite much investigating (unlike the U.S. Botanic Garden's children's garden)) and the rest of the time running willy nilly along paths.  Cam has been working on potty training and we made no less than 5 trips back to the bathrooms for her.  I refused to go each and every one of those times and waited until we were a good 15 minute walk away from the bathrooms to complain loudly that I had "to go poops."  Needless to say, we never made it to the butterfly exhibit, which was probably a good thing because there were about a million campers/schools visiting.

All in all, the gardens are pretty and would be fun for parents with little babies or more docile children than we -- there are lots of paved areas for strollers.  The National Arboretum probably suits our personalities better, but we still want to go back for the butterfly exhibit -- next time on the weekend.

a nice peaceful children's garden?  dance party time, duh.

we had a pretend wedding in the pavillion.  then another dance party.

flower in my hair for our wedding.

chipmunk!