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Spring Break Day 5: The Flower Fields!
Sometimes I wonder if I live to blog or if I blog to live. Sometimes I go places because I know they will be a great blog post. The Carlsbad Flower Fields are definitely one of those places. During Ranuncula season you can’t go wrong visiting the Flower Fields. it doesn’t matter where you point your camera, you’re bound to come back with beautiful pictures that could be postcards to put up on your fridge.
What I didn’t know was that there were so many fun things for kids to do at the Flower Fields. Armstrong Gardens definitely goes out of their way to make the whole experience kid friendly. This is a very good thing for me considering when I told Rapunzel we were going to the flower fields she said, “How Boooor-ring!”
I’m so glad she was wrong. I was kind of worried since the Getty didn’t win her over as much as I’d hoped. I would even wager that the flower fields were probably Rapunzel’s favorite thing that we did during her spring break. That says a lot considering that she’d be happy as a clam if we just went to the beach every day.
As you can see from the pictures, Whoorl came with us. That was fun. We had buggaboo races down the dusty dirt paths and guess what…. Rapunzel got Whoorl to stay and have lunch with us and eat a CHEESEBURGER!!! I know! What can I say, Rapunzel is a charmer.
After Whoorl went home, we went back to the fields and Rapunzel ran all over the grounds getting her “passport” stamped with different destination stamps (IE: lookout point, the rose garden, the sweet pea maze—which was really fun by the way, etc etc…). When you fill up your passport with eight stamps, you get a coupon for a dollar off (the regular price of $2) to mine gems at their little mining company.
Even though the mining is completely fake and they plant the polished gem stones in your bucket of sand, it was a real hoot for Rapunzel. She couldn’t believe her luck when she sifted the sand in the water and ten pretty polished rocks showed up in the grate. When we got home she counted and recounted her gemstones over and over telling me carefully who she was going to give the green one to and the pink one to and which ones were her favorite favorite. It was totally worth the dollar we paid.
The whole trip was worth it. I would definitely recommend it.
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Spring Break Day 3: The Getty
Rapunzel wants to be an artist when she grows up. I think this is really really cool, of course. However, she thinks that she doesn’t need to go to college because “artists don’t need school,” she says. I may have said something stupid a long time ago about how colleges these days are just big businesses that take all your money and you really don’t need them to get a good job anymore. Me and my big fat mouth. So I decided I need to show her why college is so important, even if you want to be an artist.
I took Rapunzel to the Getty today. My idea was that I would show her all the different kinds of art and she’d get a taste for finding out the stories behind the pictures. Art history can be so fascinating. That is my one regret with my own college career. I didn’t major in art and I never studied art history. I feel I’m at a real disadvantage because I don’t know anything about cubism or impressionism or the arts and crafts period etc. etc. These are all just words to me that I know would be really useful if I only knew what they meant.
It turns out that I still don’t know much about art and I didn’t do a very good job of inspiring Rapunzel to get excited about it either. “It’s kinda boring,” she admitted to me in the most polite way she could. I had to agree with her in part. It’s not Disneyland. There aren’t any rides or anything. Still, I think for what it is, we had a pretty good time. One of these days I think we both need to go through the museum on a guided tour and really get to the bottom of it all. Why did Van Gogh cut his ear off anyway? Any kind of tour seemed out of the question with Baby Bug in tow. But maybe next time when she’s bigger.
We really enjoyed exploring the vast grounds and gardens. We even had a picnic lunch (that I packed) on the not-so-dry grass outside. I love the grounds at the Getty. I wrote about this a long time ago when Toby and I visited. (I have no idea where that link went.) The neat thing about the Getty is that every where you go, there is a new vista point with something interesting to look at and go see. There is always something new on the horizon to go explore. It was great fun for all of us.
I think the best part of the Getty for us was the Children’s Museum though. Mostly because I finally got to let Baby Bug out of the stroller and she was so happy to be able to wander around freely touching things. I think it was hard for her to be strapped in most of the day. Rapunzel really liked all the interactive displays and they both got a kick out of coloring their own masks. I’m really glad the Getty had a exhibit like that. Everywhere else we went, the guards were constantly telling us not to touch, not to take pictures and not to wade through the water. (Imagine that!) It can be tough for a “free spirit” when there are so many rules. I mean, the water is right there just begging to be walked in! Poor Rapunzel, she sort of “fell in by accident.”
When we got home, we were in the mood to make our own art. Rapunzel painted with acrylics and I made some “finger paint” for Baby Bug. I read somewhere that you can make kid-safe finger paint out of pudding with food coloring in it. It seemed like a great idea. Except I didn’t have any pudding on hand so I used some plain yogurt instead.
The only problem with the neat colored yogurt is that Baby Bug loves to eat yogurt, plain or otherwise. The first thing she did was take a big ol’ swipe of blue and shove it in her mouth. I tried to show her how fun it was to smear it on the paper but she was more interested in eating it. So much for finger painting. I decided to cut my losses and bring out some dinner for her to eat too.
You could say she made art out of dinner or dinner out of art, depending on how you look at it.
