Another fun one

Today was all about running free, playing and stopping to smell the roses,... literally. We spent the morning at the Botanic Gardens. There was a whole lot of walking, a whole lot of talking and a whole lot of picture taking. Isabella really enjoyed looking and smelling the flowers and running around the paths in the different gardens.
But without a doubt, her favorite part of the day was feeding the fish. Holy cow! The couple of times we've been to the Botanic Gardens we've never actually purchased the fish food, so we've always just settled for going and looking at them. I've always been amazed at how quickly they come up to the surface when people get close. Well, I got my answer today.

I had Isabella sit down and placed the food on her lap for easy access. As soon as Isabella threw one pellet into the water, all the fish swam and huddled right in front of her. So I had her take a fistful and throw it in and I can honestly say I had never seen anything quite like it. The two of us were totally mesmerized watching these fish go CRAZY wild; jumping over each other and splashing all over the place just to get to this food. Needless to say, we spent quite a while there watching the fish. Even when the food was all gone, we just sat there talking and laughing about what we had just witnessed. Seriously, if you've never actually fed the fish, you must!
I remembered to pack some old bread in our bag this morning so we decided to cross the bridge and move on to the area where the ducks and the geese were. How fun to actually feed them! I took out the bread, gave some to Isabella and we started throwing it in their direction. Mind you, Isabella's reach,... yeah, not very far. So before I knew it, we were surrounded by these hungry, fearless and very focused geese whose eyes were glazed over by desire and determination. OH MY GOD! Oh, how I wish there had been someone else there to photograph/record this little episode because I'm pretty sure the look on my face was priceless.

Now I'm yelling at them and kicking my legs and trying to shoo them away, but nothing was working. So I look down and immediately realize that Isabella is frozen in place by fear with all this bread in her little hands ~ bread that the geese can clearly see, definitely want and are coming for. I grabbed the bread from her hands and threw it as far as I could, made Isabella sit on the stroller and started walking/running as fast as I possibly could to get away from these crazy beasts. Suddenly I hear Isabella say: "They're following us, mommy". I turned around and what do you know ~ there they all come, waddling and honking and scaring the living daylights out of us. I guess eventually they realized we had nothing else to offer, being that they had eaten all of our bread and joyfully taken my dignity, not to mention a few years off my life.
In hindsight, it's really funny and I'm laughing, a lot, as I'm typing. But if you would've been there, I guarantee you would've been terrified too. Those things did not back down!

So, where was Sam during all of this commotion you may ask,... luckily he was doing his thing ~ peacefully sleeping through the entire visit.