Our First Butterfly Emerged!

This actually happened a few weeks ago but I forgot to post the pictures! This is the monarch that emerged from here... The chrysalis changes from its jade green to completely transparent. I took this photo at 5:45 am as I was headed out for coffee with a friend. I was so hoping she would stay put until I got home.


Unfortunately Mother Nature didn't honor my request. ;) At 7:15 am Dh took this photo...


Gorgeous! She hung there until about noon when she started to flutter away. I ran out with my camera to get a photo and almost tripped over this guy below right outside my back door (I took this pic after I had moved him into the shade until I figured out what to do.)


The next few hours were spent tracking down someone who would take and rehab this Mourning Dove. There have been doves nesting on our roof since we have lived here. They have brought us so much joy over the years so we really wanted to help him. It took most of the rest of the afternoon to find someone who didn't live an absurd distance from me but in the end it was so worth it. The lady I brought him to took one look at the bird and said that one dose of one medication would fix him up. Without it he would have died very soon.

Encounters with nature in our tiny suburban backyard. Who knew?! :)

Wordless Wednesday

More Monarchs

We've now had four monarch caterpillars leave the garden to pupate. The first three left and we could not find them, although we searched high and low. Then this guy decided to stick around. It reminded me of the end of Charlotte's Web where one of Charlotte's newly hatched babies decides to stay in the barnyard instead of flying away, much to Wilber's delight.

We watched him carefully until he did this.....

All that night we kept checking on him as an incredibly strong thunderstorm moved in with 60 mph wind gusts, dropping nine inches of rain in around two hours. The next afternoon (of course while I was at the grocery store :( ) he did this!

The wait has begun!

Here is a really neat site to read all about "How Caterpillars Work". Check about halfway down the page to see the photo that shows all the steps of the monarch forming his chrysalis. It's amazing!!!

Turning Our Backyard into a Place to Encounter Nature

An observant child should be exposed to things worth observing.

Charlotte Mason, Home Education, Volume 1, p. 69

The parents' first priority should be putting as much of nature as possible within the child's notice.
Volume 1, p. 96

We are so fortunate to have such amazing nature trails just a ten minute drive from our home, and we have already seen and learned so much there. Yet, I want my boys to be exposed to much more: nature they can experience on a daily basis. I have come up with a basic plan to turn our small suburban backyard into a place my children can encounter, observe, inspect, study, identify and explore nature and all its wonders (or at least more wonders than we currently see anyway ;) ) ! Not a small task for a relatively tiny backyard that already contains a trampoline and swing set.

Two weekends ago we, quite by accident, started a butterfly garden. I had small contained area of our yard that was filled with ground cover before we got Wrigley, our 14 month old Golden Retriever. The ground cover died from constantly being trampled and the space had turned into a mud pit. I had the idea to start a container garden but hadn't done anything towards that end.

Then my sweet neighbor brought us a baby milkweed plant she started from seeds. We wanted to plant it and see if we attracted any monarchs. That is until I woke up last Saturday to find most of the plant (still in its original container sitting in my kitchen) already devoured by three tiny monarch caterpillars that had just hatched. The boys and I trekked off to a local nursery looking for more food for these voracious eaters.

That's when I got the idea to turn that entire area into a (tiny) butterfly garden! There is a butterfly garden at the trails I mentioned, another at the Houston Zoo and one more at the elementary school by us. We love exploring these, but I had never considered having one in my very own backyard!!! The owner at the nursery kindly showed us around and led us to several plants that would attract a variety of butterflies. All these plants have gone into four planters, two large and two small, in that once muddy mess. TaDa.....

Here are the plants we started with in case anyone else gets the itch to start their own butterfly garden! :) Btw, I just googled "How to attract butterflys to your garden" and "Houston" to come up with the list I worked from.

milk weed, Penta and Salvia (victorian blue)

dill, fennel and Sedum (summer glory)
The back of this pot is empty waiting for a passion vine
to arrive at the nursery.

yellow shrimp plant and canna
And not pictured in the final pot is more milkweed and Sedum (voodoo)

Below are our first two friends. The top caterpillar came on one of the milkweed plants I bought and the bottom one hatched in our kitchen.

And yesterday, as a birthday present to dh (Happy 38th, Sweetie!) look what a mommy Monarch left us...

More eggs. I have counted seven new eggs so far!!! And look how big and fat this little guy has gotten...

He was the smaller of the two up above!

We still have a way to go but it will be a labor of love and a work in progress in the coming weeks, months and hopefully years. I'll be sure to show more photos as our tiny garden progresses. We are making certain to obtain only milkweed that hasn't been sprayed to keep our monarch friends healthy, too. The fun thing is that, because our plants are not sprayed, we will (and already do) have aphids. We will need to get lady bugs to eat the aphids and the lizards will come out from everywhere to eat the lady bugs. How fun!

My next goal before summer gets underway is to start a compost pile. I have been looking up ideas for how to do this successfully with kids, a dog and a small backyard. By starting a compost pile we will reduce the amount of trash we are adding to the landfill and creating yet another place in our yard for more creatures to call home.

I also want to add a few bird feeders to our yard, but I want to research and be sure to only add feeders that will attract species that will not eat our butterfly friends. We have no trees in our yard so I will hang feeders off our garage.

Lastly I want to start a garden next spring. I plan to till and start preparing beds in the fall. For the past few years I have said time and again that I am dying to start a garden but I just haven't made the plunge. The one time I tried to grow tomatoes seven years ago was a disaster and still has me gun shy to try again. Still, even if we fail this first time, it will be such a learning experience for all of us!

If anyone has other ideas for how to attract more wildlife to our tiny yard, I'd love to hear it. Except putting in a pond. A two year old and a dog who loves water would not make a pond a happy thing in our yard!



PS. I am still learning this whole flower thing, especially what in the world needs to be capitalized and what doesn't. If I goofed, please email me so I can correct it! :) Thanks!

Our First Official Nature Hike!

I have been informally attempting to train my boys to be observers of nature for the past year now - in our backyard, on our trips to the ranch, at the beach... I have definitely seen a spark of interest but getting an ADHD kid to stop and really observe, well that's definitely a challenge. ;) It will take extra time and diligence on my part but I am confident the rewards will be worth it. Before all the photos here is yet another quote from Charlotte Mason; this one about the how and why of nature study.

They should be long days spent outside...But suppose we have those long days in the open air, what is to be done with them so that they are pleasant days? There must be a plan, or else it will be all work and no fun for the mother and the children will be bored...They must be left to themselves for a good part of the day to take in their own impressions of nature's beauty. There's nothing worse than children being deprived of every moment to wonder and dream within their own minds because teachers and adults are constantly talking at them, not leaving them a moment's peace. Yet, the mother must not miss this opportunity of being outdoors to train the children to have seeing eyes, hearing ears and seeds of truth deposited into their minds to grow and blossom on their own in the secret chambers of their imaginations.

~Charlotte Mason - Volume 1, Home Education, Modern Translation p. 44

Here are some photos from our first adventure. We went to some trails about four miles from our home. I used to run this gorgeous path when I was training for races but haven't returned in almost a year. It was fun to share this treasure with my boys. We can't wait to go back and collect pictures of all the different wildlife that abound there! On this first trip we didn't see too many birds and critters but it whet our appetite to return soon.

Not a great photo but he's a Common Grackle.

We were glad to finally get a picture of a Northern Cardinal after seeing several that flew away before we could snap a photo!

Took me awhile to figure out this one - a Double-crested Cormorant. Thanks, Amelia! :)

One of a million crawfish/crayfish/crawdaddy holes scattered all over the trails.

Thatcher wanted me to include a photo of this sign on our report! They were so disappointed they didn't get to see an alligator, but me, I've seen plenty (behind fences, thank you very much!) and I was just fine to have not seen one this day. ;) On these very trails, just after Hurricane Rita three years ago my friend, Justin, and I were running and almost stepped on one of these....

A cottonmouth (water moccasin) - the only poisonous water snake in North America. Nice.





Not. ;)

Footprints of an unknown bird in the mud. It will be neat the day we can look and say, "Hey, footprints from a (fill in the blank)!"

Almost at the end of our walk...In the summer we'll be able to jump off the bridge that crosses this area and catch crabs - and NO I will not be cooking them for any of you wondering! ;)

At the end of the trails you come to Galveston Bay. Breathtaking with the morning sun sparkling on the water!

And just to the right of that photo of the bay this is what you see...devastation from Hurricane Ike that struck our area just four months ago. There has been so much progress but there is much rebuilding still to do.

Seagulls feasting on a new beach Hurricane Ike created.

"The three most handsome boys you ever did see playing on the aforementioned beach," said a proud mommy (and just moments before her youngest realized his shoes were dirty and had a complete screaming meltdown when she refused to remove them due to all the sharp shells. Sigh.)

Behind the boys this is what you see...millions of seashells that used to be hidden underwater. They covered an area about 20 feet x 60 feet and were several inches deep. A treasure trove for a kid, to be sure! ;)

At the end of the path, there is a park that overlooks the bay where we stopped to play and read this sign. Beckett doing one of his very favorite things!

And Thatcher behind him searching the bay with binoculars.

"Hey, Mom! Will you take a photo of this oil tanker to put on your blog?"

And then screaming excitedly, "MOM! MOM! Hurry, I've found the Eiffel Tower!!!" To which I responded (trying hard to suppress a giggle) "No sweetie, that would be across the Atlantic Ocean, not the Gulf of Mexico, and it's so far away you couldn't even see it even with binoculars. That's part of an offshore oil rig I believe." Lol! :) :) :) How precious.

And on our way out, evidence of all the unseen deer in the area.

Alas, boys will be boys! They were more excited about seeing this Apache helicopter flying low than any other thing we saw on our hike!

If you made it this far, thanks for sharing our first outdoor adventure. Hopefully many more to come!

Christian Liberty Nature Readers

I purchased this series of books back in the summer after I heard it recommended again and again on the message board I frequent. They were then put on a shelf not to see the light of day...until just a few weeks ago.

I have mentioned before that I want to learn more about Charlotte Mason's theories on education, and in fact I have spent much time over at the Ambleside website reading summaries of her philosophies. The first thing that interested me in a CM style education is her emphasis on children learning from God's creation - a child's own natural surroundings. There is so much more to her ideas but that was the initial draw. At the Ambleside site you can read her writings in their original form, in modern English or condensed. Take a look if you are interested.

Okay, that was a digression. The main thing I wanted to share in that nature vein is that Thatcher and I have really enjoyed reading Book 1 of our Christian Liberty Nature Reader. We are half-way through and we've learned a ton already. Information is shared about Gods creatures: insects and animals in an informative but easy to understand way for young readers. We've already learned about bees, ants, mosquitoes (ick!) and several other critters. Thatch looks forward to reading and learning more each day!

Also, if you are interested in incorporating more natural studies into your homeschool endeavors, take a look at Barb's Green Hour Challenge at her blog, The Heart of Harmony. We've not officially started working through her weekly assignments but we plan to start later this summer or in the early fall. They are wonderful though and I am so thankful for homeschool moms like her who are so very willing to share their expertise!