Friday's Discoveries

We had a wonderful Friday, yesterday.  The kids and I spent some time outside before the heat got to be too much.  We discovered what happens to the kids'  shadows as the sun seems to travel across the sky.  I had the kids stand in one place at different times of the day and traced their shadows on the driveway with chalk.  We found the shadows start large, shrink and grow large again, and they move around on the driveway even when we stand in the same place.  Cool! 

Once we were outside we found tons of things to do.  We really want to feed our feathered friends this year, so we got out our neglected bird feeders for a good scrubbing.  While checking our supplies of bird seed I discovered this:

  I consulted with the experts at my favorite homeschooling message boards and was told this is probably a 'slime mold', which is not to be confused with anything to be found in my refrigerator.  Thankfully.

Along with that lovely blob we discovered these little critters:

I thought the blob and the critters were somehow related, but the aforementioned experts decreed these were probably weevils.  They have a long proboscis, kind of like this guy, who may be a cousin if Wikipedia can be believed.  I didn't get close enough to focus on the proboscis.  Ew.  Need to research and document both the slime mold and weevils for our nature notebook. 

So in any event we will not be feeding our feathered friends these delicacies.  Instead DH is taking them to the marsh and feeding them to the fishes and whatever else lives down there.  Return the nature back to nature, and get it out of my garage! 

Once we were done documenting that find we turned our attention to the garden.  We had very low expectations of the garden.  We haven't planted a formal vegetable garden EVER, so I figured between swimming and other activities we would start with a bang and it would completely
burn to a crisp in the July sun, ignored.  Boy was I wrong.   DH and DS weeded and watered diligently and we were rewarded with tons of pea pods, tomatoes, peppers and now, carrots!  Oh, and lettuce too.  Yesterday we picked a peck of tomatoes for the grandparents who are coming to visit today.  I don't know if they'll use all the tomatoes we picked, but if they don't DH has his eyes on the romas to make more salsa.   

We have picked a few carrots, trying to gauge when they will be big enough to eat for a meal.  We pulled a few yesterday that were five or so inches long and maybe an inch in diameter through most of their length.  Very exciting.  I don't know how many of those we'll get, given we didn't thin the seedlings way back when as we should have.   I wonder if they have grown way...down...deep...instead, due to lack of space.  Anyway.  We'll find out. 

I'm publishing this since I've already lost it once...

Comments

[Sue]

Sounds great! Did you get that shadow thing out of the Considering God's Creation book? I have that, but I'm not using it yet - I figured I'd wait for Faith to join us in a couple years.

Love the sunflowers, too!

[Patty]

We're using this guide: http://simplycharlottemason.com/books/creationstudies/, which uses Considering God's Creation as a resource, along with other books, etc. 106 Days of Creation is more Charlotte Mason-ish and we like that which is Charlotte Mason-ish.