Exploration

I'm not a nature girl.  As an adult I have learned to enjoy the outdoors and camping, but I just never did much of that as a child.  Allen grew up totally opposite and spent all of his time outdoors.  If you know us, it's obvious who lived a healthier lifestyle (yeah, not me).  I want our kids to really enjoy nature and enjoy being outside and I try really hard to let them just get dirty and explore but sometimes it pushes me over the edge!  I think with our house on the market, it makes it harder for me, too, to let them get so nasty and then track all of that inside.  We've got a pretty good system here at home, though, where everybody just basically gets naked on the front porch before coming back indoors.
I also need to admit that I was much more of a Chemistry fan than a Biology fan and I just don't know much about plants and animals.  For a long time I really didn't care, either, but now I wish I knew more about growing plants and identifying plants and animals.  So, I wanted to do something today to encourage our kids to be outside and to look at animals in nature.  I took them out to Ed and Lisa's even though they weren't there because they called to let us know that the baby geese had hatched last weekend.  We were excited to see three different sets of geese families that were so cute.  There was a family with two babies, a family with three babies, and a family with five babies.  The moms and dads were escorting them around the land to get food and down to the water for what looked like swimming lessons.  We went and explored a nest that was empty and saw the eggs where the babies had hatched.  We also saw another mother goose lying on a nest waiting for her eggs to hatch.  I could have watched them all day, but some of the restless people in our group wanted to move on to other things, so we went to explore and look at plants.  We found some Lady Slippers which I only knew what they were because we had just recently seen them in a book about plants.  Ruby and Ford carried a Lady Slipper around with them for most of the hike but they both eventually lost them, so we don't have any artifacts.  We did have a great time just being outside, but it was getting to Ford who has some bad allergies these days, so we came on back to town.  After Rachel's violin lesson we drew pictures of the geese and of the nest and colored some pictures of flowers.  This morning we had also written some spring words for handwriting.  It was nice to just explore.