Where the week went.

Better late than never. Here are some favorite moments from last week.

The past few days, or maybe the past week, we have been gearing up for a camping trip. It will be our second, but only sort of, since the first was for a single night and only a half hour from home. This time we are headed north to Wilderness State Park to rediscover the beauties of our home state. This trip will be a three-nighter, so still just a warm-up, really. We'll spend one day on Mackinac Island and another hiking or on the beach, hopefully, and we're pretty excited. Preparations have included research (mainly looking up lists of camping needs and wants), list making (of our own lists), and shopping (i.e. garage saling). It has been a fun exercise in "what-ifs" and "best vs. worst case scenarios", and Calvin is certainly developing a knack for contingency planning.

We finished the multiplication talbes this week and broke out Totally Tut to celebrate.

We learned about water animal life at Nature Thursdays and Calvin practiced his swimming in Independence Lake. It's fun to see how far he has come, and I'm looking forward to watching him play like a fish while we are up north.

Of course our one butterfly eclosed and went on his merry way.

We watched a spider weaves his web in the window of Calvin's playhouse, and then we watched him spin it again the next evening, and then the next.

We ate our first strawberry, and made kale salad from our first garden harvest, but we're still waiting on the rest of the plants.

And we went garage saling! We found so many fabulous games for around $1 each that we are still trying them all out. We also brought home a pretty descent Etch A Sketch.

See you in a few days on the other side of the camping trip, assuming we're not eaten by bears (this is one contigency for which I do not have a plan).

Nature Thursdays—aquatic wildlife

Nature Thursdays are back! Last year we spent every Thursday with one of the two fantastic wildlife interpreters from our County Parks & Rec commission, and yesterday marked the beginning of the same for this summer. The weekly programs are aimed at children, each with a theme bugs, or snakes, or flowers, etc. This week's session was about water-loving wildlife. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) Calvin and I were the only people who came, but we had a great time seeing our favorite Michigan wildlife specialist again, and Calvin got to touch green frogs, a crayfish, a snapping turtle, and even got to hold a painted turtle. We also went for a short hike to try netting smaller wildlife in the pond. Being just us of course meant that the program went at Calvin's pace, and because he was so obviously interested we were treated to extra discussion and netting time, which made it just that much more fun.

The program was at Independence Lake this time around, so we packed a picnic lunch and stayed to spend the afternoon, partly in learning to identify a few common Michigan plant and animal species (with only ourselves and a book as guides), and partly to play in the sand and water. Calvin is becoming a fish. He can now push off, arc into the water, and swim a ways with good kicks and a pretty good early crawl. And he loves to float around on his back. Back home in the late afternoon he spent another forty minutes in the bath. It's possible that he should have been included on the list of Michigan aquatic wildlife.

Playing the memory game, then sorting by salt vs. fresh water

Painted turtle

Painted turtle

Green frog

Trying to feed the turtles

Swans on the pond

Looking for and discussing critters in the net

Bigfoot print or tree stump?

Splashing around after lunch

Swimming!

Floating!

Getting as sandy as humanly possible!

Life

Having lost more of our butterflies (see the note I added to the bottom of my last post for details, as it's not something I feel like dwelling on further), it has been a refreshing reminder of the continuity of life to see babies upon babies around our house as of late.

The second brood of robins has left the nest under our deck, spotted little things hopping around our yard while their mamma chirps worriedly. The swan pair lead a line of six cygnets through our yard, travelling from ponds at the back to ponds at the front of our neighborhood as they do every year. Butterflies of many distinctions are flitting about our flowers, and someone other than us is eating our vegetables.

The plants are thriving as well. The butterfly garden is more lush and full every year. We have mushrooms in the lawn, and even the yuccas are blooming this year!

All of this life, even the parasites and garden thieves, has been fortuitous. Not only does its continuance lift our spirits, but Calvin and I have been talking about energy, life cycles, and the difference between the plant and animal kingdoms, and being able to witness these things as we speak is a wonderful treat. Yesterday, after a balmy morning, it stormed in the early afternoon. While it was storming we sat inside. Calvin read about weather and created a book about the animal and plant kingdoms while I wrote a book review. When the sun was back out and drying the world, we emerged to look at the change the cooling rain had made, from greening grass to newly emerging mushrooms. Refreshing. It's when things come together like that homeschooling feels like a breeze.

Calvin's book. For some reason the colors just didn't come through in the scan, but you get the idea.

Caterpillar update, we have a butterfly!

I haven't updated on the caterpillars in a while. I should have at least posted when they pupated over a week ago, but since then they've just been hanging around in chrysalis form, and that's not overly exciting.

Monarch chrysalis 10 days after formation

Then this morning we came downstairs and found that one of them had finally darkened. The dark coloration is actually the monarch's wings, visible through the chrysalis. It occurs the day of or the day before eclosion, so this was an exciting find. We immediately moved him to a shady spot on our deck where we could keep an eye on him and still allow him to be free.

Monarch chrysalis, 12 days after formation, 1 hour before eclosing

When a butterfly first emerges from the chrysalis its wings are not wet, but they are folded and unusable. The butterfly must cling to the discarded shell and pump fluid from its distended abdomen into the veins of its wings to shape and strengthen them. Although it will be able to flit a few feet on wobbly wings only an hour or so after emerging, the full hardening process can take up to six hours before it will be able to fly for any real distance.

And...it's a boy! Male monarch's have two raised, black dots on their hind wings that females do not have. These dots contain the pheremones that males will use to attract females for mating.


Two hours after emerging our little guy flitted to a more sheltered location to finish strengthening. Many people who raise monarchs keep them inside enclosures during this vulnerable time and release them only after they are fully capable of flying.

We didn't have a very large enclosure, and I figured we could keep this guy safe long enough outside, but I didn't count on the thunderstorm that swept through our area just twenty minutes after this photo was taken. Some quick and inventive thinking and we had him safely back inside for the duration of the storm. Three hours later, five hours after eclosion, the sun was back out and beginning to dry the world, so we returned him to the out-of-doors. Twenty minutes later we said goodbye to our first monarch.

Now the bad news. When we started this process we had eight monarch caterpillars. The one that just left is the one we were calling fatso, which makes sense because he was obviously the fastest growing and was ahead of the others. I believe that he left as a strong, healthy adult. Unfortunately, the rest of our brood has struggled. We lost two pupae to tachinid fly parasitism. Another died while forming the chrysalis, which I believe was probably due to OE.

Following the eclosing and lift-off of fatso we have four remaining chrysalises, only one of which looks truly healthy. Two are obviously malformed, and one, which formed the latest and is several days behind the others, is showing worrying signs of either OE or fly parasitism. I continually remind myself that these are natural population controls, and that there is nothing we did to intensify the selection or bring on the troubles. At this point we are merely hoping for the best, and at least we have seen fatso off into the wide, wild, blue yonder.

Added note (6/20/12)
We have now lost three of the four remaining would-be butterflies to OE, and I believe I should have said more about this silent killer. OE is short Ophryocystis elektroscirrha. It is a protozoan parasite that infects only monarchs. OE spores are left on milkweed leaves or eggs by the adults, then consumed by the larva (caterpillar). Once the spores have been eaten the protozoa are released inside the body of the caterpillar where they divide and increase their numbers. During the pupal stage (chrysalis), the protozoa reproduce, further increasing in number, and towards the end of the pupal stage they form spores for external survival on the imago, or butterfly. 

Signs of OE depend on the severity of the infection. Mild infections can be difficult to detect, and it's highly possible that we unknowingly released an infected butterfly into the wild, but severe infections lead to deformations, weakness, or outright death. We lost one caterpillar that simply died while forming its chrysalis, another emerged too weak to hold itself up while inflating its wings, another emerged with wings that were no larger than quarters, and the last was unable to fully eclose. These we euthanized by placing in the freezer, and discarded in plastic bags in the garbage to avoid the spreading of spores.

And a last note, about the tachinid fly. This fly lays its eggs inside the caterpillar or egg. The caterpillar often progresses normally, but dies during the pupal stage when the fly also pupates, and exits the chrysalis as a small brown puparium. The upside to the tachinid fly is that it does not only parasitize monarchs, but many garden pests as well, such as gypsy moths and tent caterpillars.

What happened to our week

Here it is Friday, it feels like Tuesday, and I last posted on Sunday. So what happened to our week? I will probably get back into the routine of posting regularly around the time that we leave for our week long camping trip at the end of the month, and then I'll have start all over again. I think routines are healthy habit. I love routines, really, but apparently I only stick with them just so long. In our family it's a good thing that Jon is more of a true adherent to routine. He is the reason we have fresh, hot coffee every morning, and that the garbage gets out in a timely fashion on Friday mornings. Which brings me back to today, which happens to suddenly be Friday, which means it's time to look back at the week.

The birthday weekend provided lots of new diversions for the week. I spent many a moment with an adorable Boris dragon, we played many games of Oz Fluxx (fun!) and Dragonology (both beautiful and fun), and we assembled a pretty awesome model hand.

Book wise Calvin has been a reading machine all week. He received several new books as gifts and he seemed to want to read all of them at once. He read all of the first Dragonology book, The Dragon's Eye, and is well into the second book in the series, The Dragon's Apprentice. There is some violence in the series, but mainly they are focused on the dragons, and we have been seeing and recording sightings of dragons everywhere we have gone all week. Calvin also read Chasing the Gnome, the first in a new series of books that is authored by a father in our homeschool group. He gave the book to Calvin at last week's gathering and asked him for feedback, which Calvin readily supplied at today's meeting, easy to do since he really enjoyed the book.

We've been practicing multiples of four all week. We mostly practice while playing ball or doing some other physical activity, or while playing Totally Tut. Following the Math-U-See lesson order, so far we have zero, one, two, ten, five, nine, three, six, and now four. Calvin has definitely mastered the concept of multiplication, but memorization will come with time, and lots and lots of games.

We mostly left off history this week in favor of birthday games and books, but we did watch the first section of The Story of India, and today we just started reading a beautiful, illustrated, youth version of the Mahabharata.

Science was our milk and cookies this week. I think summer, with the beckoning of the outdoors and the liveliness of nature around us, was made for life sciences. This week we reviewed BFSU lesson C1: energy, then we took things outside to the park for lesson C3: kinetic/potential energy (as in rolling balls down slides, etc.), and B3: distinguishing plants and animals). Sitting in the park, having a picnic lunch after biking/running a couple of miles, we had a nice chat about all the life around us, about its need for energy to survive, and its place in the world for absorbing and passing on energy. It was just a start, but a fun one at that.

This weekend we will be setting up our tent to prepare it for the summer. A biking or hiking trip is also in the works, and Sunday is Father's Day, when we'll be enjoying some fantastic ribs with family. I hope our little dragon will come along.