Nathaniel Day 2 - Botanic Gardens

Since it took me a while to start this blog there are a few Nathaniel Days to catch up on.

Interesting flowers that looked dead, but weren't

March 6, 2014 Nathaniel Day 2 - A Trip to the Chicago Botanic Gardens

(I'm going to call this one Nathaniel Day 2, but it was really the first time we did something. I think it's easier than saying "the day Nathaniel would have been 2 months old", but that's what I mean. So from now on the number is how many months old he would have been on that day.)

March 6th was a Sunday. We decided that we would do something fun as a family to help make the day be not so sad. We decided that we couldn't avoid things that reminded us of him or we would never go anywhere or do anything ever again. It was supposed to be a nice day so we decided that after church we would go to lunch somewhere and then do an outdoor activity.

We went to lunch at a little Mexican restaurant near church. The last time we had been there was the day of Nathaniel's memorial service. It's a place we like to go a lot. It was good. It always is.

Flowering cactus in one
of the greenhouses

Then we went to the Botanic Gardens. We went there because it's a place we like to go often because we can go for free. It was a little early for anything to be very pretty outside, but there are also greenhouses so we could go there to warm up and see some pretty flowers. It really didn't matter what we saw. We just needed to do something out of the house. Pretty things to look at would be an added bonus.

Abby trying to pick the bananas off
the banana tree

Mostly we just walked. We let Abby go wherever she wanted to go. She found some kids to talk to and follow around for a while. We went in the greenhouses. We walked around the Japanese garden area and then found a section that we didn't know existed with a fun bridge and a building with a rooftop garden and buttons to touch inside to learn all about plants.

We were there for a long time. We walked a lot and were all pretty tired by the time we left, but we had fun and that was the point of the day.

Following Abby on the way back to the car.