WOW Children's Garden

 
I know in our last post we officially said goodbye to summer, but today was so nice that Anouk and I couldn't resist going out for one last hurrah. So we met up with our new friends, Miss Molly, Z., and A. at the WOW Children's Garden at the Norfolk Botanical Garden.

(Sidenote: Isn't making mommy friends a lot like dating? Molly and I have discussed it and we think it is. We eyed each other at Zoo Tales for weeks before we got the courage to get each others' digits. And there was no alcohol involved to help get our game on.)

Anyway, both Molly and I had heard tons of praise for the World of Wonders, but even so, we didn't expect it to be as amazing as it ended up being. (Which was pretty amazing.) The garden is actually a series of smaller gardens based on different habitats around the world (savanna, rain forest, Australian outback) fanned out around a central sprayground like spokes of a wheel. The whole thing covers three acres, and is connected by a caterpillar path covered in vines that you can crawl through on your way to the Dirt Factory. (We did not visit the Dirt Factory. In fact, I hid its existence from Anouk as hard as I could.)

A tiny sliver of me wishes we had discovered WOW earlier in the summer so we could have taken more advantage of the awesome, but most of me thinks that right now is the perfect time to experience it.  For one, it wasn't crowded, and by "wasn't crowded" I mean that there were two other people there besides us (and they left pretty quickly, probably horrified by our improperly swim-attired children). Two, with so much space to explore, it's going to take a little time to see everything. And spending time outdoors is much more enjoyable on a day like today instead of one of those 105-degree scorchers that July was so fond of this year.

Luckily, there are a few more days of summery weather coming up, and I'm sure we could get another visit or two in before the sprayground closes for the year. And then, when fall comes in earnest...there's always the Dirt Factory (Yay?)