On Googly Eyes and Gardens and Being Wild.

Seriously.  How do you even spell googly eyes?  Is it googly?  Googgly?  Goggly?  Googlie?  Weigh in why don't you and help me solve this dilemma.

Here's a sneak peek at how our Pinterest week is coming along......

It's going okay.  We're doing the projects each day, I'm working at being intentional, and Georgia is proving that she truly is a three year old.   Thankfully, what I chose for her and I to do together (which is just about everything) requires an attention span of about five minutes--which is what we're working with.

Today she told me she just wanted to be wild instead of working on projects.  I laughed.......at her, at my pie-in-the-sky expectations, and because I was already teetering on the edge of a "thank-goodness-no-one-has-a-hidden-video-camera-in-our-house-because-I'm-about-to-lose-it-up-in-here" mom tantrum for a variety of incidents that had happened prior to sitting down to do a nice, quiet, well-thought out project.  We finished our project.  It was lovely-ish.

And then.....we set off to be wild at the botanical gardens here in Grand Rapids with some friends.  It was a beautiful day, the kids were in {for the most part} fantastic moods and I said to my friend Rachel as we plotted how we could take naps on a bench without the kids noticing, that it was the longest I'd ever spent at the gardens in one day--four hours.  It's a great place; a beautiful one, one made for kids, and one that helps kids appreciate being outdoors and playing in the flowers.

Here we go.....the wild ensues.

This is a scaled replica of the Great Lakes complete with boats to float, rapids, and little tributaries.  It's pretty awesome.  And the kiddos are soaking at the end of it and it's okay with everyone because it's so much fun.

That up there is a beaver carved out of an arborvitae tree.  I think they're way creepy.  

And as parents we should all just be honest with ourselves and admit that kids can have as much in a drinking fountain as anywhere else.  The water that comes out of them is seemingly magical and thirst can never be quenched if there is a readily available drinking fountain.  It's just the facts.

So we'll continue on with our Pinterest week.  We'll try to counter the calm with the wild.  And luckily for Georgia the pool noodle games are coming tomorrow and Friday.  And we can run and shriek and yell like banshees.

And I can revel in pictures like this that present the illusion of a child who likes calm, solace, being contemplative, and just sitting and being.  If only there were sound effects to this picture.