Victoria and Butchart Gardens

On Tuesday morning we woke up, dressed, put on our jackets, and walked out into the chilly, but clear morning.  We ate bagels and apples as we walked from the hotel to the Royal BC museum.  It was another beautiful day!

Don't these tulips look like flames?

Mosey finishing his apple before going into the museum

Serendipity was with us, and the museum happened to be free that day.  I didn't take too many pictures, but the boys had a great time in the museum.  Ben liked the Indian exhibit best.  There was an entire long house (I know it wasn't called that, but the exact name escapes me) reconstructed inside the museum, as well as an incredible display of the intricate carvings that the British Columbia Indians were so skilled at making.  And of course, the totem pole room, something I remember seeing when I was there as a kid.  I told the boys to pose by their favorite totem pole.

Brigham trying to imitate the totem's face, and doing a pretty good job.

Joseph liked the realism of this one.

And here's Mosey with his!  He liked the cut-out area at the bottom, just his size.

Think he was having fun?  (This was actually just a couple of minutes before he got in trouble and landed himself in a time out.  Ben was trying to gather the boys together and called Mosey to come over.  Mosey refused, and kept walking away.  Ben asked him again, and Mosey responded with an oh-so-respectful, "Whatever."  Yeah, not such a good idea, Mosey!  Luckily, Mosey doesn't hold a grudge and he was soon back to his normal self.)

My favorite part of the museum was temporary exhibit set up in one of the main halls.  Some of the scientists who work with the museum as researchers set up little areas meant to look like their labs.  They had specimens on display, lab equipment, and, best of all, the scientists were actually there to talk to everyone and answer questions.  So interesting!  I hope Joseph, my future zoologist, liked it.

I also liked the Century Room where clothing and objects were on display from various periods over the last 100 years.  So fun to look at items on display from the 70's and 80's and even 90's that I remember well, and that are now completely obsolete.  The pace of history seems to be accelerating, doesn't it?

After a few hours we made our way out of the museum and bought the boys ridiculously overpriced hot dogs from a concession stand on the street.  Those better have been the best hot dogs they ever ate.  :-)  Ben and I were not hungry enough to justify another $4.50 hot dog.

Brigham liked his. He didn't stuff the whole thing in his mouth at once, despite appearances.  :-)

Joseph models the correct way to eat a hot dog

He really loves me taking his picture.  :-)

Mosey did a good job with his hot dog.  I think Ben hoped that at least one of the boys wouldn't finish theirs.  Mosey was having none of that!

After eating our quick lunch, we went on a similarly quick tour of the Parliament building.  We went around back to the handicapped entrance, and were escorted in by a guard, bypassing the regular guided tours, which was fine by us.  We just wanted a quick look around inside anyway.

These are the beautiful colored paintings surrounding the base of the dome inside the building.  Splendor Sine Occasu (Splendor Without End) is the motto for British Columbia.

 After seeing the Parliament building, we drove to Butchart Gardens.  I know I've gushed about how beautiful the weather was during this whole trip, but holy cow, the weather was beautiful!  It was cool-- definitely light jacket weather, but the sun was clear and bright with not a cloud in the sky.  Butchart Gardens was glorious.  I'm sure it's beautiful all year around, but May has got to be the height of beauty.  There were more kinds of tulips than I ever knew existed.  The trees were blossoming.  The grass was emerald green.  It was just so beautiful.  I took about a hundred pictures of flowers and trees, but I'll only post a few of them here.

 This is the view of the sunken gardens from up above.  We came around a corner, and there it was spread out below us, like a fairytale.  So pretty!  2-D Photographs really do not begin to do it justice.

Sunken garden from down below.

 Every detail of the garden was exquisite.  Can someone please come and landscape my yard exactly like this?

 It almost looks fake, doesn't it?

 The afternoon sun slanting down, glowing through the petals of the flowers and leaves of the trees was almost too much to take in.

 OK, so this picture was pretty much a fail.  It was such a cute location, but the sun was at the wrong angle, and I managed to snap the picture right as Joseph blinked.  Oh well, you can't win them all.  :-)

Brigham on a bronze carousel horse.

 Ben took this one of me.  I should have had the boys pose here, instead.

 Joseph by the sturgeon fountain.

Joseph in the Italian garden while we waited for Mosey and Brigham to come back from the rest room.

 Cute Mosey.

 We offered a carousel ride to all three boys, but Mosey was the only one who took us up on it.  I think Joseph and Brigham regretted this, since it was the fastest carousel I've ever seen!  Look how happy Mosey is.  :-)

We finished our Butchart Gardens tour with overpriced (although delicious) gelato in the Italian garden, and then went on our way.  Our plan was to stop and pick up some dinner, and then spend the evening on the beach somewhere.  Well, we found a beach, but by the time we found a place to get food (like I said, there aren't many fast food places in Victoria), we decided not to go all the way back to the beach.  Instead we kept driving and in a couple of minutes we found a nice jogging/walking path overlooking the Pacific ocean.  We parked on the side of the road, walked out to the walking path, and sat on a bench and looked at the beautiful scenery.  We had  great view of the snow-capped Olympic Mountains across the water.  

We finally tore ourselves away and went back to our hotel.  Ben and the boys went downstairs to swim in the heated hotel pool and I stayed in our room and enjoyed the sunset through our big front window and read a book.  Heaven!

Weekly letter

Brigham and Joseph played a duet in church today, "Choose the Right"-- here they are practicing it just before church.


Here are the happenings in the Turner household for this past week.
Monday was a normal school day.  Joseph had flute lessons in the afternoon.  For family home evening, we wrote poems about gospel principles as part of the boys' Faith in God requirements.  They turned out... interesting.  :-)  I wrote 3 limericks, one on faith, one on repentance, and one on baptism.  I meant to write a fourth on the laying on of hands to complete the first 4 principles and ordinances of the gospel, but everyone got tired of waiting for me.  :-)  Mosey was not having a good evening.  He refused to cooperate or participate in family home evening, and so I gave him the option of cooperating, or going to bed.  He decided to go upstairs to bed.  I'm torn on this.  It is family home evening, which to me means everyone needs to be there.  On the other hand, I don't think he should be able to get away with bad behavior with no consequences.  I gave him the "go to bed" option without really thinking he'd take it.  I need to think of a better consequence that doesn't separate him from the family during family home evening...
Tuesday was another normal day.  Practicing, lessons, chores, etc.  Ben came home from work and I was still practicing with one of the boys.  He asked if I had plans for dinner yet, and I told him my plan for dinner was for him to make it!  I am really burned out on making dinner these days.  The trouble is time.  I don't get finished with the boys until too late in the afternoon, and my repertoire of 20 minute meals is limited.  It's too hot for crockpot meals-- too hot for me even to feel like turning on the oven.  Can we just eat cold cereal and popsicles for the rest of the summer?  :-)  Ben and I need to work out an arrangement for dinners.  He doesn't mind making dinner, and he usually does a good job.  I feel really guilty making him do it though, because it feels like it ought to be "my job."  And ideally, dinner would be ready when he came home so that we could eat and not have the evening dragging on too long.  On the other hand, I'm pretty much working equal hours as he is, so dividing up dinner duty is OK, right?
On Wednesday our homeschool group came over for an end-of-year pool party.  And I actually got in!  I haven't got in our pool for a couple of years at least.  It's not easy for me to get in or out of it.  But it was in the mid-upper 90's that day, and the other moms and all the kids were outside, and unless I wanted to hang out by my lonesome in the house, I needed to go out there too.  The only way I can tolerate that kind of heat is in the pool.  It felt great and I realized that walking in the pool is probably a really good way to strengthen my leg muscles.  Getting out of the pool was only mildly undignified, with help from 2 of the other moms.  :-)  That evening we drove up to the church so Joseph and Brigham could practice their duet that they performed in Sacrament meeting today.  We stopped by Sonic for dinner.  Caramel shakes and fried mozzarella sticks is pretty healthy, right?  Oh yeah, tater tots, too-- they're definitely vegetables.  Corn dogs and chili-cheese frito snack wraps are both great sources of protein, so it was a totally balanced meal.  Ben went jogging, meanwhile, starting from the house, and making it pretty close to the church before we picked him up on the way home.  Those are some really mixed messages the boys are getting from their parents, huh?  Mom getting them dinner at Sonic while dad runs 6 miles.  :-)
Thursday was a typically busy day.  Piano and violin lessons in the afternoon, and then I had to take the boys straight over to their pack meeting in Steiner Ranch.  Which meant getting dinner at Taco Bell.  Oh I'm such an awesome mom. 
Friday morning we all had dental appointments.  Joseph has a small cavity-- just the beginning of one, he won't even need to get numbed up when it is filled.  He was excited about it because it means he gets to go back to the dentist's office for a 2nd dip in the treasure chest.  The dentists there need to make appointments a little scarier or more painful or something, if only to give kids motivation to take care of their teeth so they DON'T have to go to the dentist!  Afterward, I went visiting teaching, then my visiting teacher came to our house, so the boys were left to their own devices for a few hours.  It was the last day of school for the school district here, so I guess dentists appointments and visiting teaching constituted the boys' end-of-year party.  Then I HAD to go to Target to get an overdue prescription.  It was 6:45 by the time we were heading home, and again, I had no dinner plans.  So I stopped by Little Caesar's for their $5.99 hot-and-ready pizza deal.  I'm definitely in the running for mother-of-the-year this year. 
Saturday morning I went to a baby shower.  I was up until past 4 AM finishing the quilt I made for her.  I always underestimate how long it will take me to do these things.  Ben just rolled his eyes at me when I told him at 9:30, as the boys were going to bed, that I was going to finish the quilt I was working on.  He doesn't underestimate these things.  Anyway, the shower was fun.  It was for a girl in our ward (younger than me=girl) who is adopting a baby due at the end of June.  She is the one who spoke in church on Mother's Day.  It turns out that just the week before she spoke they had been matched with a birth mother.  I'm so incredibly happy for her, and staying up until 4 AM to finish the quilt was an easy labor of love.  I'm praying hard that everything goes smoothly.  The situation is such that the chances of the birthmom going through with the placement are really high, so that is good. 
After the shower I decided to stop by Walmart to get some paper towels and a few other things.  The Walmart up on 620 is not the one I normally go to.  In fact, nearly every time I've been to that Walmart, there have been issues with the motorized carts.  But it was right on the way home and so I thought I'd give it one more chance.  Bad decision.  First of all, it was SO HOT yesterday.  It must have been upper 90's, maybe even 100.  I started getting hot just getting in my burning hot car after the shower.  The AC hadn't had much time to rev up before I stopped at Walmart.  Walking across the parking lot increased my temperature further so that by the time I got into the store I was sweating.  If I'm hot enough to sweat, it's really too hot for my muscles to keep working.  And of course, there were NO motorized carts at all.  And no greeters on that side of the store to ask to call over on the other side to see if there were any over there.  So I walked all the way down to the other end of the store only to discover that there were no carts over there, either.  At that point, I just couldn't walk any further.  So I sat down on a bench and debated calling Ben to come and rescue me.  The thought of walking all the way back across the store and to my car seemed impossible.  But I figured by the time I called him and he got up there, I'd have cooled down enough to make my way back to the car, so I sat there for 30 minutes people watching (not an uninteresting way to spend 30 minutes), and then got up and managed to get back to the car.  I hate that Walmart and I'll never go there again!  I stopped at HEB instead (should have done that in the first place) and got the darned paper towels along with about 5 boxes of popsicles (they say never go to the grocery store hungry, right?  Well, you also shouldn't go to the grocery store overheated). 
Once home, all of us got in the pool and spent about an hour and a half reveling in the cool water.  The boys thought it was really fun to pull me around the pool by my feet while I floated on a couple of water noodles.  It was really fun for me-- I was just surprised that they kept it up for so long!  I practiced walking back and forth across the pool.  Between all the walking I did at Walmart, the walking in the pool, and the horseplay that inevitably happens with 3 boys, my legs were seriously dead by the time I got out.  Ben made macaroni and cheese for dinner.  With hot dogs.  And, nary a vegetable to go with it.  We ended the night by watching an episode of X-files and eating ice cream. 
Today our new home teachers came by in the morning before church.  They brought get-to-know-you questionnaires for each of us to fill out, and I really got a kick out of reading what the boys wrote.  Here are some gems:
From Joseph (answers in red):
Where were you born? Oh, Mars
Do you speak a foreign language?  If so, what?  Martian
Have you been outside of the USA?  If so, where?  Canada and Mars
What are some of your future plans and aspirations?  Explode the world or take it over
From Brigham:
Favorite foods: Pie, cake, mashed potatoes, pastaroni, cookies
Favorite color: gold, silver, red, blue, black, purple, green, yellow, orange, brown, pink, whighte (he was covering all his bases with that spelling)
Where were you born? Utah/Nevada (technically his life did begin in a lab in Las Vegas)
What do you do for work?  Morning chores, gardening, cleaning pool, pick up house, paint fence
What are some of your future plans and aspirations? get rich
What can we as Home-teachers do to help you? give cookies, give a Million dollars
From Mosey:
Best Method of Contact:  talk (I love this one-- I had written my email address, Ben wrote down his cell number.  Mosey took the question quite literally)
What are some of your future plans and aspirations?  Skydive (wow, really?)
At church, Joseph and Brigham played their duet.  They played it perfectly before church, but Brigham got nervous with everyone there, and lost his place partway through the first section.  But they did what they were supposed to do, and Joseph kept going until Brigham was able to come back in.  They played the repeat perfectly, though, and finished the rest of the song beautifully.  I was really proud of them.  That's a scary thing to do at 9 years old.  I did have to bribe Joseph with $5 when I first informed him that I had volunteered them to play a duet in church.  I told him if he learned it and played it, he'd get $5. 
After church I tried to redeem my abysmal dinner-making performance this week by making a very healthy salad with chicken and alfalfa sprouts and carrots and green peppers and corn and lots of other good things.  Joseph ate his nicely, Mosey ate about half of his, and Brigham ate maybe a third.  Oh well, I tried.  We went on a walk around the neighborhood after dinner and evaluated everyone's front yards.  Even though it was blazing hot again today, it does cool off in the evening, something it NEVER did in Miami.  We ended the evening watching the first half of the most recent Pirates of the Caribbean movie, in anticipation of going to see the new one tomorrow.
And now it's time for bed! 
I hope everyone has a wonderful Memorial Day tomorrow.

Olympic National Park

On Monday morning we woke up, ate breakfast, packed the room, and headed out.  I went to Walmart first to get some rain ponchos.  We ended up not needing them, but the weather forecast said rain, so I thought it was better to be prepared.
Then we drove back up the road to Olympic National Park.  We went to the Heart of the Forest trailhead just inside the park.  It was a beautiful hike (obviously), and this time pretty flat.  A lot easier for Ben!

Brigham found a gigantic tree fungus the size of a dinner plate.

See, really the size of a dinner plate!

Brigham is king of the giant rotting fallen tree!

The boys kept saying they almost expected a dinosaur to come tromping through the forest at any time.  It seemed really primeval like that.

YUM!  A giant yellow banana slug!  Joseph is really amazing at finding creepy crawly creatures (he didn't actually eat it, although he did ask me if I dared him to lick it.  NO!!!).

Ben and me resting a while (well, Ben was resting, I was waiting) while the boys explored around the forest.

Mosey's turn to hold the banana slug.  Soon he wanted to go of and climb some trees, so he gave it to me with the order, "Don't let it crawl off and get away, mom!"

Mosey posing with a bunch of tree fungus.  Fascinating and disgusting at the same time.

Too soon it was time to go back to the car and make our way to the ferry terminal.  Once there, Ben walked with the boys to get lunch at Dairy Queen while I waited with the car.  This was the same ferry company (perhaps the very same ferry?) that I remember riding when I was a kid.  I was 9 years old the first time we went to Victoria on Vancouver Island.  I remember that we had a few hours in Port Angeles before our ferry crossing, and my parents took us to see "Goonies" at a theater there.  We drove by the very theater, actually, and I pointed it out to the boys.  I remember being a little scandalized by the movie as a 9 year old.  Did my parents take all of us?  The twins were only a year and a half that summer, I think.  I can't imagine they took them, so one of my parents must have stayed out with the babies.  Anyway, it's a fun memory.
The ferry ride over was fun!  A little wavy, but not nearly as much as it was the 2nd time I went across on that ferry, this time as a 13 year old (I think).  I remember the boat rocking so ferociously from side to side that I was afraid it would capsize, or at the very least that all the cars downstairs would be dented up.  However, all was fine.

 Brigham giving me his best dazed and confused look.  :-)

 Joseph on the upper deck of the ferry.  We had the best view from up there, although it was cold!

 Cutie Mosey.

 Look at Mosey's crazy teeth!  It's so funny how baby teeth come in all perfect and straight, and then the adult teeth (at least for my boys) come in totally skewampus.  I'm really hoping they'll start straightening up on their own, or else we're looking at some serious orthodontist bills.  :-)

Mosey posing on the top deck in front of the retreating Port Angeles coastline with the Olympic mountains in the distance.

We made it into Victoria by about 4:00 PM and drove out of the ferry into a beautiful sunny Canadian afternoon.  We drove around Victoria for a while, got some money changed (and were really dismayed to see how much the American dollar has been devalued...), and then parked behind the Parliament building while Ben used his Blackberry to find a hotel.  The boys played on the lawn while we waited.

We found a great hotel for an even better price (thank you expedia.com) right downtown, drove there, dropped off our stuff, parked the car, and then headed out on foot to explore the city.

Victoria is seriously so beautiful mid-May.  It probably is all year, but the city was bursting with blooming tulips, flowering trees, and blossoms of all colors everywhere you looked.

 (It's hard to take a focused picture while being whisked along in a wheelchair)

Here's the Parliament building by the light of the afternoon sun.  So pretty!

We walked around for a while, admiring the fancy hotels, the sparkling ocean, the cute little tourist shops, until we started getting hungry.  I thought we would be able to find a small little cafe where we could order some fish and chips, but there really wasn't much in the way of easy food, at least not on the roads we were walking on.  In general, I noticed quite strongly how many fewer eating establishments there are per square mile (or kilometer, I guess) in Canada as there is in equivalently populated areas of the US...  I could be appalled by that, I guess, but I'm thoroughly American, and I kind of like my eating choices to be easy and varied!  :-)
Anyway, we finally settled on a seafood restaurant right on the water.  We were seated in the back with a great view of the sun setting over the water.  The boys had fish and chips and Ben and I shared beef wellington, which I have never had, but seemed appropriately British for British Columbia.  It was good!

By the time we were on our way back to the hotel, dark had fallen and we had a great view of the Parliament building lit up at night.  What a cool effect!

 The moon was full that night with just a few scattered cirrus clouds.  So beautiful!  This is the view from the side window of our hotel room as we fell asleep that night.  Great day!