Something has been eating our dragonflies

Even with my mediocre camera, the pictures of the transformation at our little concrete garden pond are quite amazing :)

Someone - or rather something - has been eating our dragonflies. Below is dd's collection of wings picked up from the garden path. She says she saw a bird catching the dragonflies at the pond.

Mud. Sand. Water.

Plant science took a back seat on Wednesday as instead we headed off to a local nature reserve with two other families. Trudging through the rain and equipped with fishing net, catapult, saw, hammer, and crazed spaniel, I guess, we must have looked a strange bunch.

The very small pink thing on the ridge of the tall sandy cliff? Yep, it's dd, the child that tells me she's scared of heights!

It's at times like this I remember all that I learnt about soil erosion and mudslides at university.
Yep, that tree looks darn precarious to me. That's it child, just terrify your mother by standing next to it.

Water, sand and mud. The best combination of playthings.

Catapult boy.

Don't try that 'I'm not up to anything' look with me!

Those crazy home educating families head home.

If you've ever read Puss in Boots then you'll know that Dick Wittington always carries his lunchbox in a pink fishing net.

It was Bertholt Brecht in the Bathroom with the Golf Balls on Wednesday

But first...let us start at the beginning.

A trip to the woods, via the water. Quite literally.

Nearly a 'You've Been Framed' qualifier:

Sawing wood for the fire

Cooking...

Marshmallows

Popcorn (in 2 sieves, wired together):

Home-made onion bhajis:

Baked potatoes (wrapped in thick foil trays):

Improvised fishing:
'I don't think you'll be much in the water in January.'

'I know. It doesn't matter. I just like to fish.'

Fungi...in all their variations:

The discovery of spores and their release (using pointy stick)

'Aren't some fungal spores toxic?'

'Hmm...shall we move on?'

A new path

Leading to a fab climbing tree:

And the golf balls? Well. It's amazing what you can find on a nature reserve:

Just one or two...bags full.

Later I share a gritty bath with some freshly-washed-with-nail-brush golf balls while I get to grips with Bertholt Brecht. Bless him.

Why the inside of our car looks like it does...

Long live muddy interiors!

Wild in the Woods

Some photos of our recent trips to the woods.

Today the kids were running around when a school group arrived.

One of my kid's friends said 'They must think we're really wild.'

To which I replied 'Well you are wild: you're free range and they're battery farmed!'

ds2 leading the way

and looking like something out of Lord of the Flies

Ds2 just chilling

Marshmallows are compulsory

Woof woof (bark)

Look what we found...

and these too!

And photos from our other recent visits:

DD and the beanstalk (actually it's creeper growing over a very old dry stone wall)


Playing starwars

Some creatures that came with us (oh joy!)

weird fungi

hanging on a hay rack

building a ladder out of branches

A visitor, come to check if we've got any sandwiches

Bare Butt-erfly Sandwiches topped with Beagle Beans

Today, carrying on with our Darwin and Evolution theme, we - or should I say ds2 - made South American Comida. What has this to do with Darwin? Well seeing as the Darwin geezer popped off around South America in The Beagle, there is a tentative link to this dish of beans, tomatoes and squash. Honest. Well that's what the book said and I'm sticking to it.

Are you impressed that we are still working on our P -P - P ..ok I can't say the P word.
Our P word that has 'ject' at the end, which from now on I'll call our THEME. Does theme sound better? I can't remember what I decided last time I wrote about this.

[I've just noticed something interesting about the P word: If you take away the P and replace the 'O' with an 'E', you get another interesting word: a word that best explains what my kids usually do when I say to them we are doing a 'P' word.]

Anyway, are you impressed that we're still doing Darwin? So am I. I'm not sure what it does for our autonomous education status, but I guess we got to a point when something had to give. And whatever it was has left some space for Darwin.

Chopping butternut squash (all fingers intact)

Cooking (no fingers burnt)

The finished result!

Anyway, The Beagle has officially now got as far as The Galapagos Islands, and the sticker is about to go on the map (when we find where The Galapagos Islands actually are - yeah I know, somewhere near South America...). So here I am, with baited breath, preparing my mind, body, and what's left of my soul, to grab the Galapagos DVD and shove it in the player. Ok, so it was the cheapest dvd I could find about the Galapagos Islands, so I'm hoping it isn't so incredibly boring that the kids will hate watching it. I must confess that David Attenborough and his fossils DVD was starting to grate on all of us after a week of viewing the series. Though I guess it was interesting to see how Mr Attenborough looked back in the late 80s...he seems to be ageing much better than this mother of 3. Hmm...I suppose never having been pregnant or given birth gives him a significant advantage.

So what else have we been up to? Oh the usual. We visited the sailing club during the week and as it was too blustery to sail we spent some time 'butterfly hunting' instead. We're joining in with the Great British Butterfly Hunt of The Independent newspaper. See:
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/uk-butterflies/
I've just added our sightings to the map. The best one I saw was the Speckled Wood butterfly, really pretty (unfortunately this isn't on the list to add to their map). We saw loads of Peacock butterflies too, more than I've seen for ages and ages. I didn't tell the kids to do it, or even ask them, but once they saw me looking at the poster and filling in a chart with the butterflies, they joined in too. I'm sure that's something John Holt talks about in his books (not the bit about butterflies).

We've also been doing the usual fire-lighting, storm-kettling, and marshmallow melting.

Hmm..my touch-typing is a bit skew-whiff today. Having twice replaced the 't' s in the word 'butterfly' with 'g' s (which puts a whole new slant on the word!), as well as just typing 'tough-typing' instead of 'touch-typing', I'd probably better finish off now...

[Before I go, I must let you know that I've just this minute Googled the word 'comida' thinking it would be some specialised word for a particular type of stew. NO! It appears to be the Spanish word for food! Ho hum. I knew there was a reason why I didn't like this 'Evolution for kids' book that we're using. Why don't they tell you things like that? There I was thinking we were making some exotic dish and all we've made is South American FOOD!]

Oh and if you're wondering why I have put such a strange title for my blog post, I have no idea. I just got fed up of trying to think of wonderfully creative titles and thought this one sounded interesting, even if it bears only a slight resemblance to the blog post.