Botanic Garden

 Lexi seems to have settled into a one-nap-a-day schedule, waking around 6am, going down around 10am and sleeping for 2-3 hours.  I’m super excited about these long naps and just pray that they stick around because not only do I have time to work out and shower, but it also gives me a good hour+ to eat and catch up on some TV.  Anyway, as you fellow Southern Californians know, the weather here has been pretty nasty over the last few days.  After this weekend’s storm I tried to go to our usual playground over at Polliwog Park, only to find this:

I expected some flooding, because really, that pond overflows at the slightest sprinkle, but I didn’t expect the entire play area to be submerged, so we had to settle for the “big kid” play area on the other side of the park.  Today I thought we would try something a little different and visit the South Coast Botanic Garden in Palos Verdes.  As soon as we got in, Lexi hit the ground running, but was quickly diverted by the tiny pebbles that made up the path, and we spent a good 15 minutes picking them up and then dropping them.  Well worth my $8 admission.

The place actually has a children’s garden that has some sort of storybook theme so I steered her that way.  She was super pumped about it because not only was there a cat statue, but a little bridge that she can run across over and over and over again.

There was also a “secret tunnel” made out of trees that Lexi found pretty entertaining.

Do you like how 80% of my pictures are of Lexi’s back?  She’s really big on running these days, which often means running away as soon she’s got some open space in which to exercise.  Not that I’m complaining – whatever keeps her entertained as well as wears her out is alright with me.

Speaking of running around, the next stop was some wide-open grassy area.  I don’t know what it was there for, but Lexi seemed pretty happy to run across the space and sit and then run some more.

We also checked out the greenhouse, rose garden and koi pond.  The place isn’t gigantic – we were only there for 1-2 hours – but Lexi seemed to have fun for at least the first hour we were there.  After a while she just wanted to touch all the flowers (NO!) and wander off the path (NO!) and finally I just had to start carrying her around.  The last thing we saw was the koi pond, which was a good place to end – Lexi found the fish interesting enough, plus there are a bunch of benches around so she was climbing on them and doing a bit of exploring.

I’m really happy that we at least have the option of a large garden to visit only seven miles away, it gave Lexi a nice change in environment and let her be a little louder and more toddler-like than a visit to LACMA would have afforded us.  Luckily the weather seems to be dry for now, so hopefully the park will have dried up a little by the end of the week and we can resume to business as usual.