Home of Good Crawly Toys

Evelyn was joyfully holding a darkling beetle (what mealworms grow up to be).  This was 8 years ago and she was four.  Overcome with her enthusiasm she blurted out, "Life is just so much of a good crawly toy!"

Since that day I have tried to instill a respect for living things and encourage the children to see themselves as stewards of nature. But deep down they still think living things are the best crawly toys ever.

On our second day at Lassen I was hot to get to bubbly volcanic sulfurous things. But my friend Judith, newly arrived (with salad!), suggested we walk from our campsite to and around Manzanita Lake. We were awaiting more friends who would want to see the lavaworks, so why not? Manzanita Lake turned out to be a hot spot. Not geothermally, but for good crawly toys.

And it was stunningly scenic.

Yay!  Friends!

The kids adored the ephemeral ecosystems on floating logs below.

And I loved the views.

And then began the parade of wildlife. 

Some things stayed out of our reach.

But not this handful of baby lizards that Evelyn caught.

Or this long garter snake.

We did not try to touch this Douglas squirrel.  He's put on his winter coat and the squirrel equivalent of a hat with a pom pom--his darling ear tufts.

We could probably have touched these very tame foraging deer.
Evelyn snapped these deer photos.

We wondered what they were eating. There wasn't anything green around except pine needles. So when they moved on, we investigated.

Mushrooms!  In this photo you can just make out that the mother deer has a big mushroom cap in her mouth.

I wondered if that meant those mushrooms would be edible for people, but did not try my luck.

Evelyn discovered in our mammal guide that deer aren't the only mammals to eat fungi.  Chipmunks are connoisseurs of truffles.  We wondered if you could train a pet chipmunk as a truffler.  Chipmunks also like forbs the book told us.   What, you ask, are forbs?  The question bothered us throughout our internet-less stay at Lassen.  But you can just click on the word forbs.

Look at the tiny snake head between Evelyn's fingers.  It must have been reptile hatching day at Manzanita Lake.

Ok, which one is cuter, snake or girl?

We watched this dipper playing in the rapids.

See his little head below?

Next up, bubbly volcanic sulfurous things.  And cuddly extremophilic bacteria.

If you already knew what forbs were (or have anything else to say) leave a comment.

Wordless Winter Wonderland

From Pumpkin Seed to Pumpkin Pie

A Story in Pictures.

Work and Play

Evelyn had a class at Lawrence Hall of Science, so Clem and a friend got to play with the kapla blocks.

In this case "play" meant stooping, gathering blocks and placing them over and over again. When the tower got too tall for them they had to stack stools to stand on. I was glad no museum staff walked in on this scene.

It took forty five minutes to build.

And but a moment to...

...destroy

We just finished listening to Tom Sawyer in the car and I thought of this passage on work and play. It comes during that scene where Tom tricks his friends into whitewashing the fence for him:

If he [Tom] had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement.

This, I think, is the secret of homeschooling, which I have to learn and relearn. If you don't oblige kids to do work sooner or later they will do it themselves and call it play.

Even math and the dishes, but not the latter often enough.

Hot Topics

Some of the glow of our Hawaii trip hasn't left us yet. Before the trip I picked up some new music for the car: Here Comes Science by They Might Be Giants. And we loved some of the songs so much the entire car was belting them out with the CD. Especially The Sun is a Mass of Incandescent Gas, which is just a great song, even if it is--um--wrong.

Which is what They Might Be Giants thought, as I learned listening to this Radio Lab episode, so they kept the song, but followed it up with The Sun is a Miasma of Incandescent Plasma. Which has the great lines:

Forget that song!
They got it wrong.
That thesis has been rendered invalid.

I got a real kick out of hearing the kids sing these songs, and they led to a discussion about the scientific process. And about plasmas. Kind of amazing that this undermentioned fourth state of matter is the state that 99% of the visible universe is in.

Greta was particularly taken by the whole idea of plasmas. Here was a conversation from yesterday. Even though we told her about plasmas she just can't help herself from retelling us about them.

Greta: (excitedly) Dad, if you get water really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really--
Mike: Yes, we get the point--
Greta: Daddy, stop annoying my reallys! Really really really really really hot, it turns into a plasma.

Greta was indignant about the line Even when it's out of sight it shines both night and day. You see, when she was an alien, it was her job to put out the sun every night.

Another beloved song is A Shooting Star is Not a Star, about meteors, which is great sung in rounds, and was interestingly appropriate yesterday when we were at a birthday party and a large meteor cut across the sky. Sad to say, I was oblivious, but I did get to see the contrail.

There is a song about the planets which is little more than each planet's name but...so much more.... Jupiter is sung with great thumping bass notes like a stomping giant.

Evelyn claimed that Jupiter was not big enough to deserve such pronounced stomping, but we checked this hypothesis out yesterday at Chabot Space and Science Center and found that while, as Greta can sing for you, the sun is so large a million earths can fit inside, only 1000 Jupiters will fit in the sun.

Jupiter is stomping big.

We got to peek at it through one of the telescopes and see it and the 4 moons Galileo discovered, and it was like seeing a friend.

Wow, education with a sound track. It really does make it more exciting.


Click on the mp3 icon below to hear, if not the most rousing rendition, at least an example of our car singalongs.