Reiman with Ryan and Grace

Surprise!  The garden again.  This time I was really excited to take Aunt Grace and Uncle Ryan, mostly Grace because she's super into bugs and used to work at the Butterfly Kingdom at the York Zoo in Maine, so I thought the Butterfly Garden here would be great.  And another surprise!  A picture of a butterfly.

 I think this picture is adorable even though Ryan is making his angry man face.

 It's tulip season here, which believe it or not is a HUGE problem and keeps making the evening news.  There's a town close by with Dutch heritage that has a tulip festival every year.  It's a big tourist attraction with gardens of tulips everywhere, events, a parade, and a pageant to crown Miss Tulip (or whatever it is she gets crowned).  The problem is that because everything has bloomed so early, the town doesn't expect any tulips to be left for the scheduled weekend.  Whoops.  They must all feel a little deflated, kind of like the poor droopy tulip in the front of this planter.  I totally didn't notice until Grace pointed it out.  We got a good laugh at the tired/wimpy/sad/etc. tulip.

 I wish I had taken a picture of this body of water in its entirety, because it's hilarious.  It's called Lake Helen.  Lake, in my mind anyway, means something more than a dug pond.  It is, to the lake's credit, a rather large pond, but still something you might see on someone's front lawn in Maine, if they've got a few acres.  I suppose it's named after someone and they might have thought Lake Helen sounded a bit more stately than Helen Pond or Helen Water Feature.

This is a picture of the nesting Canadian Geese, though you can barely see the nest.  It's on the right, amidst the rocks and weeds.  At one point, one of the geese got out of the pond and walked toward the people at the garden, which thrilled Lucy.  Ryan kept trying to convince Grace to catch a goose ... that would have been fun to watch.

 Awwww, this looks like it could be Ryan and Grace's family.  As you can see, Jamie was struggling toward the water.

 Grace wanted to take a picture under this beautiful tree.  I've got to find out what it's called and have searched for "purple flowering tree", but what I come up with are a bunch of pictures from people's blogs that say things like: "This is a beautiful purple flowering tree, I've got to find out what it's called."  It makes for good photo taking though!

What fun to have our Minnesota family in town!  Lucy will sometimes sit down with her guitar and sing a song that goes like this: "I want to go to Minneapolis but Mommy said no tee dee dah dee."  There was a sincere disappointment when Uncle Ryan and Aunt Grace showed up without Lucy's best friend Tiger, too, but at least we could send Ryan and Grace home with the gift we got for Tiger ages ago.  We'll be looking forward to going back to Minneapolis and seeing Tiger play with his Angry Bird cat balls.