gettin' our garden on

 How is it August already? This year is FLYING by, and I feel like I'm so far behind in everything. Life is like one big hamster wheel lately, running and running and not getting anywhere. But today we finally got to go out and do something together, all five of us, for the first time since we got back from vacation a month ago.

Max has been, as you may be able to tell, really into botanical gardens and arboretums lately. And just this week I managed to find time to peruse my Small Town Escapes Indiana Tour Guide (thank you for that, Barb!) a little bit while the boys were swimming at Price's, and I discovered that there's a small botanical garden pretty close to us in Elkhart. So we headed for Wellfield first thing this morning, and it was just beautiful. A lot of it is still being developed, and it is pretty small (about a half-mile from start to finish around a loop) but with lots of nooks and crannies to explore and different features to see. There were sculptures everywhere too, in unexpected places, which made it extra fun.

The boys have very different styles when we go to places like this, so that can make it a little hard to wrangle them all. Henry and Liam want to go go go, to see everything all at once and race from one thing to the next, impatiently waiting for us to catch up just so they can race ahead again. But Max likes to take his time and really absorb each thing, to talk about and smell each flower and speculate on where we could plant it in our yard if we had one to take home. I think Mike and I both fall more in line with Max's style, so we had to take turns running ahead with the other two.

To top off our morning, we stopped by to see my brother, who was on medic duty at the fire station quite near the botanical garden. He gave us a short tour and explained some of his equipment for the boys, and let them climb into a fire truck and an ambulance and honk horns and ring bells. They look up to him so much, and it was great to see him in his work environment. Luckily for us, they didn't have any emergency calls while we were there, so we got the full tour and then left the firefighters to their lunch -- though I guess it would have been pretty exciting the other way too!