Beautiful Spring

We spent an afternoon earlier in the week outside in our "back-back". It's so wonderful to see how excited the kids now get about exploring our little piece of God's creation in our backyard. They hurridly grabbed their nature journals and pencil/crayon boxes and I grabbed some books and a blanket. That was all that was needed for our afternoon outside. The kids love running and playing in the trees, leaves, and flowers. They spent lots of time picking flowers for Mommy (some may call them weeds...but to a 7,5, and 2 year old they're beautiful flowers!). Dd7 drew a beautiful nature journal entry showing a butterfly that they'd seen as well as a snake that scared her in a hole. She and dd2 were walking towards the tree line and she happened to look into a hole that was mostly covered with dead leaves. There sunning himself was a little black snake. I tried to go see it with my ever inquisitive son but all of the screaming from Dd7 must have scared him back under the leaves. Still, I have the beautiful drawing from my daughter to help.

We have been seeing Mr. Redbird around our back patio quite a bit recently. He's been a favorite of Ds5 so we decided to look him up in our Handbook of Nature Study. As we were playing in the back I gathered the children together onto the blanket for a quick science lesson about the Cardinal. We learned all about this beautiful bird and his mate. We saw picture of their nests and learned that Mr. Cardinal is a very attentive mate and father. He brings Mrs. Cardinal all of her food as she's nesting on the eggs. And once the eggs have hatched and Mrs. Cardinal is busy working on the next set of eggs, Mr. Cardinal cares for the little baby Cardinals. We had yet to see Mrs. Cardinal...but to our surprise, this morning as we were doing school Dd5 saw our Mr. Cardinal in a tree outside. We went over to watch him and who was there beside him but Mrs. Cardinal. We watched them fly off together into our neighbors yard and talked about how sweet and loving they must be to each other.

Needless to say, we are so very glad that Spring has finally arrived and we can't wait to spend more time out in our Lord's playground. I wonder which creature we'll discover next??