Catching up

So I haven't been all that good about making daily updates to this blog, so I will do my best to describe what we did last week in our nature lessons.

Wednesday: we took a walk at the nearby USFWS boardwalk in town to investigate what was happening in the swamp. The Fauth kids came with us and I had to spend a little time trying to settle and focus everyone, instead of just running around willy-nilly. This was we were better able to see wildlife. We found lots of mushrooms, discussed cypress knees and tree breathing, watched which way the water in the river was flowing, found turtles, butterflies, spiders, water beetles, small fish and geese. We then went to the library and checked out slew of books, including books on beavers which Ami was asking about on the walk. Once we got home we took out our nature "good book" (Ami chose a green one), and drew pictures of the leaves we collected and the things we saw, also writing a list of the items in the book. Ami read me a chapter of "Owl at Home," and we practiced the recorder and knitted a little.

Thursday we studied about Alligators, something the kids are very much into right now. We have alligators around here, and we watched some youtube videos of alligators here at ARNWR. We made a poster collage of an alligator and wrote out the word A_L_L_I_G_A_T_O_R, assigning an adjective to each letter describing the animal. We then switched to beavers, reading the books we got from the library. We made bread, read aloud from Black Beauty, and did some math review. At 3:30 in town there was a showing of "Pete's Dragon" playing at the historical theatre, so we headed down there for something different. The kids liked it, but I found it incredibly looooooooooooooong and frustrating to deal with Eden, who would not be quiet or sit still or take no for an answer, at all, ever! She's still cute though :) and this is a small town, few people in the children's movie,  so I wasn't too worried about it, it was just exhausting.

Friday we cleaned the house (it's our official cleaning day), but not very well, since I discovered that Viola had eaten a large amount of Pokeberry plants over in the Swain's yard. This made her sick and weak from digestive problems. We had to medicate her a few times and I wormed her for good measure. We made dinner, which was venison meatloaf, fresh bread, homemade mac-n-cheese and green beans. Lydie stayed over. We lit candles, read some nice poetry, said what we were most thankful for in the past week.

Sunday we had slaughter day, this was a good nature lesson if there ever was one. My mom came over and watched the kids while Chris and I worked putting 10 turkeys and 3 ducks into the freezer. It was hard bloody work, and I felt bad doing it. Ami came out once in the middle of me cleaning out a turkey and I told her "this is why we aren't eating meat anymore." "Why not?" she askes. "Because it's not nice," I reply. It really is not nice. I don't like taking lives, specifically from animals brought into existence for food. We will continue to eat roosters, drakes and bucks that are a by-product of our egg-layer and goat-milking efforts, but beyond that, it's just too high a soul-price to pay for a few meatballs.