On Thursday, Mom, Evan, and I went to the largest Children’s Garden in Asia: Jacob Ballas Children’s Garden. It is inside the Singapore Botanical Gardens. It has exhibits about plants and playgrounds to play and learn about nature. By what we read, it was a great place.

In the morning, we rode on bus 156 to the Botanical Gardens. When we went inside the Gardens, we immediately came to the pond. There were black swans and turtles. When we came close to the female swan, the male approached us slowly, like he was protecting the female. We quickly walked away, to the turtles. There were so many! Evan tried to name all the turtles. I helped: Rock, Tree, Branch, Leaf, Green, and others. We fed them and then walked to the Children’s Garden. 

A lady at the visitors center gave us a map of the garden. We went through the gates and went on. The first thing we came to was the sand playground. Evan dug with the excavator, and I ran on a tilted wooden disc. It was really fun. I was exhausted when I jumped off! When we finished playing in the sand, we went to the maze. It was really easy, so me and Evan went through lightning-fast. Mom said we were going the wrong way, so we turned around and went to the ‘farm’. The farm had vegetables, fruits, and other plants growing. We saw green beans, eggplants, and a pumpkin that was eaten by bugs (eeeeeew!). After we walked around the farm exhibit and admired the plants growing, we went to the zipline, meant to show kids how Malayan Colugo flies (a flying lemur). It was so fun! Especially when the zipline ended, and you knocked against the spring and flew into the air! Near it was also a trampoline built into the ground, and a course where you have to climb and walk your way through. It was awesome. We stayed in this area for an hour, maybe even more. Evan and I didn’t want to leave, but we went on.

After that, we wanted to get to the treehouse playground to play a little more. On the way, we stopped at the river exhibit to see the fish and a turtle. We tried to feed the turtle, but the fish kept snatching the food. The turtle, realizing that the food sinks to the bottom, dove under and started to eat from the floor. Good turtle! 

When we came to the treehouse, Evan shot off like a rocket to climb to the top. I climbed up, too, but after finding out that there were other things to do, like sitting down, I came down and started to play a game with Mom. Our record was 19 (it’s kind of a hard game). Evan made friends, played for a looooooong time, and finally, when we were super hot and Evan’s friend went away, we came out of the garden, and looked at the Black Swan pond again. We saw the turtles relaxing in the sun, and guess what – we saw a baby turtle! We named him Reddy, since the turtles were red-eared sliders. He could barely crawl! We took a few more pictures, and left the gardens with good memories.

We had a great time. I hope to come here to learn, look, and play again.