Scavenger hunting

It was a lovely sunny Sunday morning here: not yet unbearably hot, yet late enough on a Sunday that we'd finished videoconferencing with grandparents, had a bite to eat, and yet still been able to sleep in until past 8 o'clock.
One of the delightful things about where we live is the proximity to a beautiful botanical garden --- rather than the manicured, overly tended sort of place this name sometimes conjures up, the local botanical garden is muchly an overgrown wilderness of paths and trails through woods.

Boo and Skibo went scavenger hunting, together with eight other children, friends of theirs and siblings. They had difficult lists of things to find (difficult in that none of the children read well enough yet to read the lists!) --- we spent half an hour or so trekking round the gardens, stopped for midmorning snacks of muffins, pineapple, bananas, grapes, etc: then meandered on for another hour or so. We checked their booty: pine cones, leaves (brown, green, red), stones, pine needles, sticks and leaves of grass. And all the children were spectacularly good at observing the "if you want to smell a flower, that is fine: you must not pick them"
and "no! don't go near the poison ivy" rules).

By the time we had finished, it was past noon, and the temperature was around 90: even with 40% humidity I'm finding it oppressive, and it is only June. We stopped on the way home at the grocery for provisions for dinner (we were given a big bag of fresh home grown vegetables, including marrow-sized zucchini, so we decided to try to do a stuffed zucchini as a side dish for dinner tonight).

A fun, if exhausting morning. And then LOML decided that the day was perfect to go off for an afternoon hike with other friends! Crazy!

N.