A No-Playground Day!

After yesterday's all-day park adventure, I needed a break.  It's been hot here (not HOT like back home) and the long outings to parks are draining.  I've realized that weather.com does a poor job of forecasting Basel's weather.  It routinely predicts a high in the upper 70s and then it ends up mid-80s.  That's a big difference when you are pushing two kids in a stroller (both of whom technically could be without!) or working hard to spin the merry-go-round as fast as their little hearts desire.  Now, I've started using this site, instead, which, of course, requires conversion from celsius to fahrenheit.

So, instead of a park or playground, we headed out to the botanical gardens at the University of Basel.  We explored a few green houses and saw lots of interesting flowers and plants. Several times Layla exclaimed, "This is so awesome!"  Trees and flowers, no flashing lights, no thrilling rides, and she thought it was awesome.  Proud mom moment.

The kids illustrate how large this tree is.  Actually, Layla was just stretching, but it works!

Giant lily pads.

Josh was scared that the cacti would get him!

Layla searches for little fish.

After our garden adventure, we headed to the main library to exchange the books that we'd taken out from our local branch two weeks ago.  I'm surprised the library gets any business, considering how hard it was to find, even right in the middle of the "down town". Down an alley and up a tiny elevator (that was fun with the big double stroller) and we finally found our way.

Enjoying the selection of English books.  

Next to the library was a cool toy store that had a slide for the kids to get from one level to the next.

Layla works to persuade Josh to go down the slide.
He wanted to so badly but was just too scared.

Layla, on the other hand, went down 4 or 5 times.

Then in the evening we took the tram to the other side of the city to visit another Novartis coworker and his family.  The kids were enthralled by the 4 various castles that the children dug out and Josh couldn't be happier that he was allowed to borrow a dragon and also a small treasure chest full of gold doubloons.  Don't know what a gold doubloon is?  Clearly you haven't been watching as much Jake and the Neverland Pirates as I have!

Layla works on an art project with the kids. 

Josh examines his bounty of gold doubloons.