Nature Adventures

Scotty took us to the Prince William County Fair one evening this summer - the children were introduced to some pieces of Americana such as a demolition derby and a ferris wheel. We walked through the youth exhibit hall and they were inspired to join 4H and make some entries for next year's fair. We found a 4H club just 10 minutes from us and we attended our first meeting today. Faith is a regular member and Christy and Jonnie are Cloverbuds. Seth is our family mascot at meetings.


After the business meeting, the club's Junior Amateur Naturalist group met. The leader showed the children some model boxes with various insects, frogs, etc. at different stages of development. We then drove to a local farm and explored some water samples from their pond.

Our leader is the woman in the yellow shirt. She is a retired speech pathologist who has followed her passion for nature and now works full time for the County Extension Service as the coordinator of the Master Gardener programs. What a gem! I am so thankful for this opportunity. The picture above has all four of the Nowlins in it. They are using microscopes to get a closer look at the insects.

Christy was given the title "Best eyes of the group" as she used a sieve to find loads of different insects for us to examine. Faith was deemed "Master bug catcher" when we made our way to the pen of Llamas. After Faith fed one of the llamas, she caught this grasshopper and put it on the fence for all of us to study. A few moments after I took this picture, Faith told us the grasshopper had "pooped". The adults all oohed and aahed and said "Look kids!" whilst the children crinkled up their faces and looked away :-). Our wellies from England came in handy today - I got to wear mine too. Seth was fascinated by the "quick sand" mud and I think he made it his personal challenge to see how close he could get and still get his boot out. He failed twice and left his boot for me to retrieve. I was thinking that if we could just get this type of mud in a 10'x10' space in our yard, Seth would spend hours walking in it and get great exercise to boot.

We'll do some drawings for our nature journal this week. What nature journal you ask? Oh, the one we're finally going to start :-) Next month we'll be learning tree I.D.

Our friend Dorothy in England kindly asked us to post some pictures of the sights we see in DC on our blog. Dorothy, pond dipping is probably not what you had in mind, so I'll post another entry with some pictures of the cherry blossoms in April. Scotty took us into DC on the metro with him one morning so we could see them before he went into work. Gorgeous! Seth asked if it was snowing when he saw the air filled with the blossoms....