martinzoo

As you will recall from my Monday post, GB and I have been having sort of a rough week. His attitude hasn’t been the best. And he’s been holding back on our curriculum. He didn’t complain outwardly about the curriculum, but he’s had no enthusiasm for it; even for the science and history, which he typically loves. And I’ve felt all week like I was saying, ‘No, no, no’ over and over.

I’m probably a pushover, but on the advice of several of my readers, I decided to give GB a break from the curriculum. We can definitely afford it, we’re about two weeks ahead of schedule. So, today was a “Yes” day. He loves to go traipsing through the State Park down the way, and we have a cut-through path right across the street from us. So today we had a nature day for him, and for me, we did a really cool craft; which I will post later….. It’s not quite dry.

We were a little distressed that some of the pathways are getting a bit overgrown. It seems like people aren’t using the park paths these days.

We saw a surprising variety of wildflowers, which we haven’t identified yet, but we’ll do that soon.

And I showed him how some of the wildflowers disperse their seeds.

I love this pretty pink flower. It was such a contrast to all the greens and browns on the ground.

And the foliage is just so pretty here in central Virginia.

GB thought this moss felt just like carpet.

And this stuff felt just like the sponges that you pay a fortune for in the bed and bath stores. It’s roots didn’t go very deep at all. In fact, GB felt bad that he disturbed this little puff from it’s spot.

Check out the lichen in these photos. The green lichen in the bottom photo didn’t even look real to us, and we were there!

And, omg! It was a mushroom day! We saw so many different kinds of mushrooms. We are going to have to look through our field guides and identify all these. So many colors!

This one had a pretty lacy edge and was quite large.

But not as big as this one, which is splitting under it’s own weight.

This was a strange looking mushroom. I’d never seen colors or a shape like this. It sort of reminded me of a turkey sculpture….LOL! And no, folks, that is not an upside down mushroom. That is the way it was growing. Don’t bother trying to enlarge it, it’s fuzzy. Too bad, because it was so cool.

This one just made me think of houses for fairies. It’s so perfectly shaped, with just the right overhang. Aren’t they amazing in their perfection?

This shroom reminded me of the shape of my morning glories. Doesn’t it have that trumpet shape to it?

Again……. HUGE!

These little red ones were so cute! And I didn’t even notice the cool spider web in the background.

And for those folks that think we’ve come out of our drought….. I’d like to post exhibit A. This used to have running water about as high as that branch there.

I’m sorry for those family members who have slow computer collections. I know you don’t like it when I put so many pictures on my posts. But I just couldn’t decide on which photos to eliminate. So I kept them all.

It was a great “yes” day. Maybe we’ll do it again. And hopefully, GB’s mood will be much better the next time we sit down with our curriculum. I really want my easy-going guy back.

Gramma and Grampa came over yesterday and took advantage of our park day with the homeschoolers. Our group alternates parks every other week. And this particular park is pretty far for us to get to. It takes us about 40 minutes to get there. But that just goes to show how spread out the homeschoolers are around here.

Anyway, we homeschoolers usually meet around 1:30. And Grampa has been bugging GB and I to go letterboxing again soon. So when I went on the letterboxing site I saw that there were several boxes in this particular park. So I fullfilled my haircutting duties and off we went to the park.

Once we got there I discovered I had made a major boo-boo. I had forgotten to bring the clues to the letterbox. I was SO bummed. But Gramma and Grampa were so enchanted with the park that we decided to just do the nature trail, which turned out to be about a mile and a half trek around the park. And it is SUCH a beautiful trail. It skims right along the beautiful James River and has lots of benches to sit and watch the water flow. I loved it!

Here, GB is partaking of one of the nicely placed benches, and getting acorns dropped on his head……..LOL!

The wind was something fierce. See how it’s blowing his shirt all over? GB was genuinely worried that he may get blown away.  In fact, as I write, we are under a wind advisory.

Here are Gramma and Grampa with their nicely coiffed hair.

Isn’t the river pretty?

This was a boat landing. Although, I couldn’t imagine actually bringing ours out here. It’s pretty dry. But maybe it’ll be better next year. GB was enjoying the hill while Grampa conducted an experiment to prove which way the river flowed. I said something about how the river was flowing fast, and he said “No, that’s just the wind. The river actually flows in the other direction, towards Richmond.” So he promptly threw a light stick in there and made us watch as it actually moved against the wind in the opposite direction, albeit a bit slowly due to wind conditions.

I remember Grampa thinking he was tough and doing this to me when I was a kid. Little did he know that I just thought it was annoying and frustrating. I’m pretty sure GB was having similar thoughts.  But yeah, Grampa, I’ll concede, you’re still strong…………for an old guy……….LOL!

I thought this tree was really cool. It literally grew out of the river bank like that. But the erosion on the sides of the bank made it seem like it wasn’t long for this world, which will be a shame.

After our journey around the trail, where I took no pictures of the beautiful wild flowers (what’s up with that?), we had a nice picnic. It was windy and chilly, but the view more than made up for it.

Then Gramma and Grampa went on their way and GB and I stayed for his weekly Wednesday park day. He looks forward to this day more than any other during the week, even weekends! So it’s really easy for me to say, “If you don’t behave, there will be no park day.”……..LOL! ………. I have to use what I’ve got, you know?

After yesterday’s post, I thought I’d lighten up a bit and show you our moon from last night. Isn’t it pretty?

My sunflowers are a big hit in the yard. All the critters seem to be enjoying them. As they die off and the heads get dried out, I notice bits and pieces of my flowers laying on the ground and the railing of my deck. This adorable goldfinch has been enjoying plucking the seeds right out of the center of the flower. Beautiful, isn’t it?

I think next year I’d like to try to build a  sunflower house that I had read about a long time ago in Family Fun magazine. I had no idea how easy it is to grow sunflowers. And I think it would be a cool project to try.

After watching the cute little chipmunk going after our sunflowers, GB and I got curious. We had never seen the inside of a sunflower. And we wanted to see how many seeds you get from one flower.

Now we realize that it depends on the size of the flower, so we checked several different sizes. We were surprised that even within the same size spectrum, there was still major differences.

We had five dead heads on our sunflower plants. One was only three quarters of an inch, two were one inch in diameter, one other one was one and a quarter inches, and the big one was three inches in diameter.

This is what it looks like on the inside of a sunflower. Can you see all the seeds?

This is what it looked like after we removed the seeds.

GB is cutting into the big mamba jamba flower. It was quite tough.

And here he is counting the seeds.

Here are our results:

3/4″ flower = 9 seeds

1″ flower = 18 seeds

1″ flower = 26 seeds  (See the difference in the same size flowers?)

1 1/4″ flower = 287 seeds

All in all, we ended with 380 seeds. That’s not too bad, considering we started those plants with *one* seed for each flower. Although, I have noticed that some of the stalks have more than one flower on them. So that’s even more seeds from the initial seed.

I have lots of prettiness on my deck right now.

The pretty sunflowers that the chipmunk hasn’t gotten to yet………..LOL!

Aquagirl gave my this lily about three Mother’s days ago. And each year I get more blooms on it. Isn’t the color stunning?

My fresh herbs……….. Pay no attention to the munch marks from those evil little japanese beetles. Urg!

And my sweet, dear hubby got this water fountain for my for my birthday two years ago. It makes a delightful water/trickling noise when you are sitting quietly on the deck. I love that!

I don’t know what kind of wild flowers these are, because I just blindly threw some seeds into a pot. But I like them. They’re quite pretty.

My hubby also got this chiminea for me on another one of my birthdays. Doesn’t he get good presents? We don’t use it very much. But I love the way it looks. And my morning glories are really getting *attached* to it, too………..LOL!

Today I made a very sad discovery.

All but five of our 108 tadpoles have been killed by something. There were two water beetles swimming around in the habitat, but I don’t know if they are the culprits. All I know is that this morning when I went out to feed the tadpoles they seemed to be fine. Late this afternoon………………. they were all floating. I don’t have high hopes for the final five, either. I’m very sad about this. I had gotten quite attached to our little guys. We had raised them from eggs, and at least ten of them had grown up and gone off on their own. But it just saddens me to lose so many, so quickly.

I also had a pretty little flower plant that has quite suddenly succumbed to junebugs. Oh, those little critters were having a feast! The leaves on my plant are totally lacy now. It was quite gross when I glanced over, intending to water the flowers and noticed ALL those bugs! Ugh! ………… I am making my totally annoyed face right now……….. just so you know……..

On the bright side, they haven’t touched these yet. See my pretty sunflowers? I stole the seeds from my bird seed. It’s funny, because if you look at the second picture closely, you’ll see a cool comparison. The ones closest to the deck came from one bag of bird seed, and the ones closest to the camera came from a different bag of bird seed. The leaves are totally different. The closer ones haven’t bloomed yet, but I think maybe within the week I should be able to see the difference in the flowers.

See the difference in the leaves?

Now I just have to keep a vigilant eye out for sunflower predators. Last year a squirrel came up on my deck and grabbed the whole flower and took off to the woods! He left me with a pot and some roots. Kind of him, wasn’t it?

My bil sent me the link for this cool eagle cam by Hancock’s Wildlife Foundation. It is in British Columbia, Canada. The nest is literally right on a road, with the tree only a few feet from the road’s edge. And you can hear the cars go whizzing by. It’s really cool because they’ve had cameras set up to observe this nest for two years with no eagle action, and now they’ve finally got two baby chicks. GB and I have sat enthralled today. I hope you enjoy it, too.