Our Family Day at Longwood Gardens

Yesterday we took the boys to Longwood Gardens. My mom had won tickets last year at a Christmas bazaar, but forgot to use them until this past weekend. Turns out they expired 9/30, so they went on Sunday and we went Monday. I was a little leery about taking the boys because it’s basically just looking at flowers, right?

Wrong. We arrived right around 11am and didn’t leave until almost 4! That’s a long time of looking at flowers! It has been about 8 or 9 years since I was last at Longwood Gardens and that was before I was a mommy. I didn’t realize there were so many things for the kids to enjoy there!

The first thing we did was go to the Birdhouse Treehouse. This is a kid’s dream! Inside the treehouse you can use binoculars to look around and find birds. There are books for the kids (and adults) to learn about the birds they might see.

From here we headed to the Garden Railway exhibit that’s open until Jan 2015. If you go to Longwood Gardens (with or without kids), make sure you see this! Charlie’s favorite was Thomas and James, but they had a couple others that weren’t from Thomas & Friends too.

After we looked around at some other things, we found a nice spot to eat our packed lunch surrounded by roses and other flowers. Charlie thought everything was so pretty!

This was our view after lunch:

We found an awesome kids area, the Pumpkin Playground, with pumpkins, bee facts, and maize for kids to run around and play with. Charlie especially loved the giant pumpkin! I commented to another mom that there were about 4 boys running around all the same age. Clearly, it was the boys takeover day!

This is pretty much as good as it gets as far as taking a picture with two little boys while other kids are running around having fun and their mean mom makes them take a picture!

We learned about bananas!

And… there’s another play area just for kids! The Indoor Children’s Garden has fountains the kids can play in and the staff will give you towels if they get too wet!

We had a great time and I’m sure we’ll be back! Visiting Longwood Gardens with kids is much different than the last time I was there, but I loved it! Seeing Charlie react to some of the flowers and plants, as well as play in the play areas was great.

So… if you think Longwood Gardens is just for senior citizens to roam around and admire plants, think again!

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