Hiking for paw paws

I had no idea what a wild paw paw was before today, but it was a hike to look for exactly those crazy fruits that was led by our county parks naturalists this morning. The weather was fabulous, the colors were just starting to come out, so we decided to drive the half hour south to join in the looking.

We'd never been to this particular wildlife preserve before today. Being a preserve, as opposed to a park, it is very wonderfully wild, and there was something very Jungle-Book-esque fabulous about hiking through undergrowth and mud and shaking trees while protecting your head in case of dropping paw paws. We actually didn't find any on the trees. Our guide said it was likely someone had already come through and harvested them, seeing as that it's public land, but we weren't entirely disappointed because, after shaking tree after tree, we were still rewarded with a taste of a nearby farmer's paw paws, and some Zingerman's Creamery Paw Paw Gelato brought by our wonderful guide.

Plus it's hard to be disappointed by a hike that, although not productive as far as fruit goes, produced much in the way of wildlife. We saw lots of animal houses—crayfish, woodchuck, snake, raccoon?—plus several wood frogs, a flicker, two praying mantises, a snail, and skippers, butterflies, bees, yadda yadda. We tried wild berries and roots, and identified a variety of native plants and trees, some of which had been stumping me for a while.

These programs are mainly designed for adults: a few miles, lots of climbing in and out of scrubby and wet areas, lots of quiet listening, looking, appreciating, and discussing. The children's programs are shorter and less physically demanding, plus they usually come with stickers and coloring pages, but Calvin enjoys both equally as well. We've been taking him on the adult hikes for about two years now, carrying him when he was still too small, but making sure that he was part of the event. To us nature is interesting for itself, not for the coloring pages, and we've wanted to share that wonder and awe with our son from day one and have included him accordingly. I will never get tired of the looks we get from some adult hikers when we show up for these events with our pint-sized hiker, and then their utter amazement when they realize that not only is he up to the challenge, he usually knows almost as much as they do about the natural world around him.

In his words:

Picking apples

Today was our first field trip. Ever. We joined our homeschooling group for a tour of a local apple orchard and came away full of cider, donuts, and good, fall fun. Our group is large enough that we divided by age, us belonging to the group of young children, of course. We took a tour of the enormous fridge full of apples (that's a big fridge, and actually that many apples in storage don't smell all that good—apple overload), then we got to watch them run the press used for making cider, and the sorter used to wash and, of course, sort the apples by size after they are brought in from the field.

The tour was standard—exactly the kind of field trip I remember from my own school years, complete with donut, cider, and coloring books. I loved the guide, who talked about how important the bees were and encouraged the kids to be respectful of their presence, not freaked. She also shared a number of interesting nature and apple tidbits with the kids before setting us loose on the orchard and allowing us to pick five apples each. At 85 degrees it wasn't exactly fall-like, but they had beautiful trees that made me happy, and Calvin got a real kick out of picking the apples.

In his words:

Nature Thursdays—hiking Dolph Park

The county parks Nature Thursdays program is over, but we did nature today, and it's Thursday, so...

Beautiful weather called us outside. We did the usual first, like vacuuming, laundry, straightening, some math, lots of reading, and a little piano, but the afternoon was meant to be spent outside, and that's where we went.

There are several parks in the area that we intended to explore this summer, but heat and other activities got in our way, so we are exploring them this fall instead. We stuck relatively close to home today, stopping by after running errands and only an hour or so before time to get dinner going, and spent an hour exploring trails right in the city. The last time I hiked this location was when Calvin was only a year or so old; he was riding in the backpack, and we found a fawn hidden by his mother in the dappled sunlight under the trees. Magical. Today we saw swans, dragonflies, and plenty of mosquitoes that made me glad for the long clothing and bug spray. Calvin's nature eyes are getting more practiced and he found two snakes and several patches of fungus all by himself. Our only disappointment was a lack of frogs, but two snakes just about make up for it.

Visiting history—Henry Ford Museum

My camera has two—TWO—sd card slots, but do you think either one had a memory card in it when we went to the museum today? No.

The Henry Ford Museum. At just about forty minutes from us, it's going to be a great hands-on, real-as-life tool for our U.S. history exploration. Build a mini car on a mini assembly line, build a real honest-to-goodness Model-T; design, create, and test fly your own paper air planes; climb into the cabin of a plane, the engine of a Steam train, the driver's seat of a car, even the very bus from which Rosa Parks made history; and peruse hundreds of artifacts from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries in the U.S., like the Wienermobile! I see regular field trips in our future.

And thank goodness for camera phones.

In his words:

Allosaurus

We are squarely in the Jurassic period around here now. We completed the species list and felt creatures for the Triassic, and then we watched Allosaurus, a special episode of BBC's Walking with Dinosaurs. Who could ever have believed a carnivorous Allosaurus could be a sympathetic character. We're all a little in love with Big Al now, so I know what felt creations are on my plate for tomorrow. This newest exploration we're on—the trip through evolution—is really the first time that I've utilized multi-media as a learning tool. When Calvin was younger we sometimes watched the Old School Sesame Street shows (volume 1 or volume 2), or sections of Planet Earth, but until now the TV or computer were merely rare bits of entertainment. I still don't view the TV as an educational tool, but entertainment is a part of learning, and vice versa, so when we found the BBC series that was kind of a match made in heaven, and we have two great iPad apps about evolution and dinosaurs as well now. They've been good jumping-off points.

Today we made Triassic felt and started Jurassic felt, we did a dinosaur puzzle, we played Allosaurus all morning. We both practiced the piano, and we did some math and map worksheets together. We practiced drawing, we sorted and shelved books in the library sale room. For Calvin the past few days have been full of sudden mental leaps, and even though phases like these always bring with them an over-tired, grumpy attitude, I have come to understand the cycle over the past few years: a sudden onset of grouchy, crazed behavior, even after plenty of sleep, has almost always been a sign of expanding mental capacities with him. He does this at least twice a year. In the past I've panicked, wondering what had happened to my usually cheerful son, but I've since learned to be patient and to look for the newest achievements.

Patience is something I am learning with motherhood.