observing without disturbing

LEarning to Listen, watch, and observe without touching, making noise, and generally disturbing the animals around us.

I made the boys sit on a bench on the edge of Lotus Pond (CNC) for 5 minutes. We were quiet. We watched. We listened. We saw and heard things that we hadn't in the past. In the past they are touching the water, being loud, and scaring the animals away.

We are going to continue this practice. Maybe it will lead to a quiet meditation at home. That would be really useful.


It was also Art on the Trails day at the CNC. SO we packed up our water colors and headed off. We also used colored pencils that they supplied. Terje and I drew a daylily. Ezra drew a frog, tadpole, and eggs, and a pond. Then off to more flowers and the pond. Ezra used muck to paint muck around his pond picture.

We also used the watercolor paints to paint pond scenes.

We saw the toads that are brothers to ours. So we do really think they are toads and not frogs. The boys found a few large bullfrogs, leopard frogs, dragonflies, adn a huge tadpole. We learned bullfrog tadpoles can take a couple of years to mature. They (like frogs) bury themselves in the mud over winter and then continue growing in the spring.