Teaching them to love Mother Nature, young!

So yesterday we took a biiiiiiiig long walk down the macnamara trail. http://www.ontarionature.org/network/groups_detail.php?ID=101ps_detail.php?ID=101 We found a lot of beautiful things, like mushrooms, chipmunks, acorns, streams. The kids had an absolute blast! When I was a wee little kid myself I remember my Mom doing the same. From the second I found out I was pregnant with my first, I knew that I would be teaching my children about the beauty in nature and how to respect it. Teaching them to get down low and seeing whats below there feet. They were amazed at all the amazing mushrooms and critters we came across!

So we do try to get out into local conservation parks as often as possible, but some days the weather doesnt nessesarily want to co operate. so I have taken extra effort to bring nature indoors as much as possible with the kids. this mostly comes in with indoor gardening. They love watching things grow. We have done the traditional beans in paper towel, but last year we had a lot of fun planting a pomegranate seed. We didnt really know if it would actually grow, but after a long germanation period it did! What a surprise to us to see it sprout up!

(Taken May 2008)

so as the days went by our little experiement began to grow and grow, the kids love coming to check on how BIG the pomegranate bush is getting. Ofcourse due to our climate, the bush cant be planted outside so its found a nice little home in our kitchen. We are treating it sorta like a bonsai, I gave it a trim today, it was starting to get reallly crazy. My daughter keeps asking if it will ever grow pomegranates, unfortunatly I dont think it will, but I tell her to be paitient and see if it wants to someday grow them and if not, we will enjoy the ones we buy at the market.

There is one particular branch that has always made me smile, knowing that it needed a swing on it. So tonight that is what we did, found an old broken truck of my sons, took off one of its wheels and made a tire swing with some old hemp twine and then made a little wire dude to sit on it. I can just see now how my childrens minds are going to go off into this little wire dudes world, does he swing when we are not in the kitchen? I can picture it now.

While out on our nature walk yesterday we came across a LOT of acorns that squirrels knocked out of the oaks above our heads. The kids had pockets full of them when we got home. I sudjested we put them outside for our local squirrels but keep one and see if we could get it to sprout as well.

So we have planted this little acorn in a shallow dish in hopes it will grow into a mighty oak, just in tiny size!