Chihuly, baby. And ten days of real food.

So we have never been to the Denver Botanic Gardens, and as it turns out, twice a year they have "homeschool days" where you can get in for a reduced price and they have little educational stations throughout the gardens for the kids.  Awesome, right?  I was very excited to see that the homeschool day in October was still during the Chihuly exhibit - glass sculpture on loan from his Seattle gardens (right Brian and Becca?)  It was SO cool.  I have not seen such unique art before, integrated all throughout the 24 acres of the outdoor gardens.  I loved it.

The kids...well...hmmm.  Problem #1 was when we first arrived, I realized I had left our whole bag of real, healthy, delicious food at home on the kitchen counter.  So from the start, everyone was starving.  At 10 am.  It's almost like since they realized we had no food bag, they could think of nothing else except when and how we were going to eat again.  Because without the bag, we might starve and die.

By 11:30 I finally put an and to their suffering and bought lunch at the Gardens cafe restaurant, and the second half of the trip was not quite as whiny.

The Botanic Gardens were just beautiful, I will make an effort to go there again in the summer when everything is in full bloom.  Maybe without the kids. :)  This is when we first arrived, and everyone is convinced we are doomed to death by starvation:  Caleb was mad that there were no animals or rides.  But see the cool red glass reeds??

That tall yellow thing is a glass sculpture, the lighting is kind of weird because of the time of day, we were half in shadow.

 Ella liked these hanging bell flowers. :)

 The only other picture Caleb would pose for.  He liked the huge leaves!

 Looking at the giant goldfish in the pond - that boat thing and all the water baubles are glass!

 Focus on the boat.

 Caleb's favorite plant exhibit - the carnivorous venus flytraps!

 Amazing, right?  Over 2,000 separate pieces of glass in this one.  Wowza.

Kids: can we leave now?
Me: (sigh) fine, let's go....(mumbles)  party poopers.
Haha. :)

And the 10 days of real food was just that, 10 days of trying to eat nothing processed, no white sugar, no white flour, etc.  It wasn't too bad - I posted my notes on facebook.  Our only big mess up was this visit to the gardens and having to buy restaurant food.  Caleb was mad about no cold breakfast cereal, but overall I thought it went great and have integrated some of the changes on a more permanent basis.  Yay!