Flower show and daylight savings

Daddy took his girls to the Philadelphia Flower Show Saturday.  It was supposed to be a surprise last Sunday, but I came down with that awful cold last weekend.  The theme was something British, so as expected the displays were split between royalty/English garden themed and pseudopsychedelic Beatley stuff (Eleanor Rigby-esque umbrella stuff and yellow submarines abounded).  The big displays were cool but it was so crowded that you could barely see them and there was also always a solid row of people taking pics of them and thus it was hard to get a good shot.  Plus, I kind of felt like a dork, like a kid with a stamp card and if you stop at each booth and get all the stamps you get a prize.  Everyone is a photographer now, and I feel like the prevailing attitude is if you don't take a picture of it then it doesn't count, but the need to constantly document everything takes away from experiencing it in the moment. I say this as a confirmed luddite, but realize the hypocrisy of writing this in my photo blog which was started for the precise reason of capturing the fleeting moments.  Digressing!

My favorite displays were the pictures made of flower and plant pieces. These you could get a good picture of! 

 

Of course the prettiest flower at the flower show was:

We browsed the sellers' area for only a tiny bit as Opal was getting cranky.  The hot product of the year seemed to be miniature terrarium displays.  We bought a little do-it-yourself kit for one, which includes a tiny little guy or gal to reside in the miniature world.  I don't know which one we got yet as we haven't opened the box yet.  I hope we remember to put it together before the moss it came with turns to a crunchy brown dustball.

The drive in was horrendous, the traffic just awful.  Whenever we haven't been into the city in a while, I always feel guilty that we're not taking advantage of it, but the truth is between traffic and then finding and paying for parking, it might as well be as far away as NYC.  Yeah, I guess we should try the train or whatever, but I just don't see it being feasable with all these little kids.  I don't see carrying four kids' worth of crap around with us all freakin' day, then wrangling all of them both ways on the train and not being able to escape to the car and leave at a moments' notice.  So really we take as much advantage of the city as is comfortably possible, which is to say not much.  One of the main reasons why I'd like to live in or right outside of a smaller, more accessible city.

Zeb has really been studying the Toddler Book of Dick Maneuvers.  Despite going to bed extremely late on Saturday, on Sunday he woke up screaming and tantrumtastic at 6:45AM, which would be bad enough.  But it was the first day of daylight savings, so it was really more like 5:45.  Then he never took a nap that day, but rather used his new dirty trick escape maneuver that we'd managed to avoid so far with the older boys, and I'm not talking about literally escaping, which he has also done.  I'll spare you the details.  Despite the rude awakening and toddler thunderstorms, we managed to have a pretty good day.  We took the new skateboard attachment on the stroller for a spin on a trip to the playground.  Zeb enjoyed it, but I'm still nervous about using it when it's just me and him and Opal.  Now that the weather is getting better, though, I'll have to get over that nervousness if I want to ever take walks during the day when I'm home alone with them. 

When we got back, Nic and I watched Argo in the afternoon while the kids watched Leslie Nielsen's Mr. Magoo.  We popped ourselves some popcorn, with olive oil of course.  Nic reminded me that we still have that "blue" (black) popcorn from Eli's sixth birthday, which was the season of him being obsessed with atypically-colored produce ("look up purple carrots, Mommy!"). 

So it was a decent, if exhausting, weekend.  The only thing we didn't get done that I wanted to get done was going to Whole Foods or Wegmans to get more dairy-free stuff for me.  I think it's going to be a few days before we get adjusted to the time change, though!