Skagit Valley Tulip Festival

I've never been to the Tulip Festival before today. Partly because this year is the first year we could travel for an hour in the car without someone howling on the way there, or taking an inopportune nap. You know, the kind where your kid falls asleep 2 hours before bedtime. Here we are in the car:

And I'll give you a preview of where we are going to end up. It's not what I expected.

Yup.

Anyway, the Tulip Festival was beautiful. We kept finding new favorites, after thinking we had found our favorite already.

The river of grape hyacinths:

 These two get along so well, it amazes me.

And then we had a picnic snack, and felt refueled:

Aspen surprises me these days with her sudden and unexpected stillness. It never lasts long, but is striking in that she has been still so rarely.

If you're curious, she was trying to escape the camera. We were essentially playing tag/hide and seek, but with the camera.

 I'm losing, and I know it. Mom, 0: Kids, 1

And then we went to the tulip fields…

 We made a very brief effort to keep them out of the puddles, but quickly saw they were going to win again. Mom, 0: Kids, 2. We've learned to pick our battles, and make them things we really care about. Keeping the kids clean and dry were not high on our list today.

 Aspen's favorite things to play with are always from nature. She could be perfectly happy living in the middle of the forest with no toys, I'm sure of it.

On our way out to the car to dry off and change into whatever clothes we had available. And blankets. They both went home snuggled up in their current favorite blankets.

Mud.