Nature Study

Well, two weeks into our school year, and so far nature study has been done from the window. Let's see, what have we done so far...

We were in week 14 of Year 4 this past week. So far we...

read about earthquakes in Madam How and Lady Why...
.....and lived through our first earthquake!

(Actually, poor dear son was down at the creek with his friend, and being outside, he didn't notice a thing. I, on the other hand, first thought the dog was scatching himself behind my chair, but he wasn't there, so I thought the washer was out of balance, ...but that wouldn't shake the whole upstairs... So I wondered if a helicopter was landing on my house, but I opened the window, and it was perfectly quiet outside. So I finally understood it was an earthquake... and it kept rumbling and rumbling... The bathroom mirrors rattling against each other... but no damage.)

We read about volcanoes, that near volcanoes earthquakes occur, but they can also occur where there are no volcanoes. And then, fortunately, we did not experience any volcanoes...

We had a hurricane come through (really, it was Tropical Storm Irene by the time we got it). We lost our electricity, and one of our maple trees shed a huge, huge bough, which by God's mercy caused no harm. So we cleaned it up (five trash cans full of tree debris with plenty more, but no more cans), and after recycling emptied the cans we cleaned up from the yards.

We took a fast trip to NC to visit Nana and Pop Pop for Nana's 80th birthday dinner! (We didn't tell her we were coming; it was a great surprise for her!)

We got home to tropical storm Lee, and four or five solid days of torrential rain! Worse rain than Irene, but without the wind.

Last day of the storm we drove to a little local communnity fair to enter our items into competition! What a wet, muddy, messy trip that one was! But worth it, as my son and I got nice ribbons on almost every item we entered. (I suspect there may have been less people entering because of the weather... I mean, it was hugely pouring, and there was thunder and lightening, roads flooding... awful weather, during the hours when you were allowed to enter your items...

So, our weather has finally cleared, for now. We have a really cool field trip planned for Wednesday where we will go out on a pontoon boat on a lake -- I think the boat has a glass bottom or something... and we'll take binoculars... I'll try to take photos.

So, sorry no photos of the earth quake or the two tropical storms, nor of the road trip, nor of the fair... I guess this might seem like a boring blog entry to some, but we have felt the past three weeks to be a fairly wild ride for our normal start of school...

Note to self: remember to use camera for future blog entries...

Til next time!