what the kids have been up to

Ok, so enough about me and my fun in Foxboro, what you guys all want to know about is how the kids have been spending their time the past week or so. Well, here's a sampling of some highlights:


They spent quite a bit of time at the end of last week exploring the trees in our yard, inspired no doubt by Tree Camp, which finished up on Friday, much to my kids' disdain, as they would have been happy to do Tree Camp for about a year.




Over the weekend they spent as much time as possible at our beloved lake beach, which closed for the season on Sunday (SOB!!!). It was a wonderful summer, and we certainly took plenty of advantage of our beach pass, but it always seems like such a short season.




J suddenly took an interest in the weather, and built this wind sock, set up some sort of rudimentary humidity measure that involved a pine cone, and organized a notebook to keep track of temperature, wind direction, and relative humidity. I can only imagine he must have read about this somewhere, because this is all news to me.


J's also been wanting to find some Jewel Weed (aka Silverweed, aka Spotted Touch-Me-Not), so this morning we went on a walking excursion to the end of our road where I had seen some growing. We had a blast popping seed pods, and collected handfuls of seeds, which we distributed in our own flower garden when we got home so that we can have seed-popping-fun right in our own yard next year.

Zoo Boy made the find of the season in our Milkweed Forest around noon today -- this really awesome Monarch caterpillar. We had a bit of a debate about whether to let him continue to grow and pupate in the Milkweed Forest (which is what J thought would be best) or to bring him indoors to the terrarium so we could observe the process (which is what Zoo Boy was lobbying for). Zoo Boy eventually won with his argument that if we didn't watch it pupate, we wouldn't know for SURE that it was a Monarch. Honestly, I was in favor of the indoors observation option, as we're going to be reading a couple of Enki nature stories in September about Monarchs and the Monarch Migration, and having first-hand experience with the life cycle will no doubt allow the stories to mean much more to them. So for now we've got a live occupant on display on our Nature Table, complete with a banquet of milkweed leaves.

We also finished up the chapter book we were reading, "The Enormous Egg" by Oliver Butterworth, which was just fanciful enough to be fun, had just enough suspense and mild peril to keep the kids on the edge of their seats occasionally, and was written in a wonderful voice, from the first-person perspective of a small-town New Hampshire boy of 12 yrs. We also began our next chapter book, "The Trumpet of the Swan" by E.B.White. I started it with a bit of trepidation, as Stuart Little was not a big hit with the kids (they never really seemed to get involved with the story, and they didn't like the open-ended conclusion of the book -- they aren't quite ready for things not to be wrapped-up for them at the end of a story). But so far they seem quite captivated by this book, so we'll see how it goes. It's a bit longer than our last selection, but we also should have more reading opportunities as we get rolling with our school year, so hopefully we won't wind up feeling bogged down by it.