Japanese Festival

It has been a gorgeous few days so we were on the lookout for a fun family event yesterday afternoon.  The Botanical Garden is hosting their Japanese Festival, so we decided to check it out.  Thank goodness Nonna came along!

 The first thing we saw were the bonsai trees.  The boys actually thought these special little trees were pretty cool.  Especially when they realized that several of them were older than Nonna!

 We made our way through the Climatron to try to check out some of the Japanese exhibits.  We were actually really disappointed - things sounded very kid friendly online, but the reality was far from kid friendly. The ice sculpture area was one melted block - we were expecting a demonstration.  The balloon art cost extra and the marital arts exhibitions were done in slow motion without any explanation.

Fortunately the garden is a pretty cool place even without a festival, and there sere some things to keep the kids entertained - like the boxwood garden maze and this jumping water fountain.  I honestly don't know who was more entertained the family in the background, or Max and Will.

I really wanted to boycott on principle, but we ended up paying the extra $15 to enter the children's garden - I firmly believe that when you already pay $60 you should get to see everything!!  But it was worth it.  The boys had a great time exploring and climbing all over the place. 

All in all it was not our best outing - if I'm honest 75% of it was actually pretty awful.  Certain little boys were not being the best listeners, Jack screamed at the top of his lungs every time we left something he liked, and Max was super disappointed that we couldn't ride the tram.  Thank goodness Nonna came along - otherwise we might not have all made it home alive!

We followed up the not so fabulous adventure with a wonderful dinner at Nonna and Nonno's where all three boys were perfect angels.  I guess they knew they had pushed us to the limit already :)