Baking bread, burping yeast

These days, Dominic is pretty quick to use the word "Me." As in, "Who wants a chocolate chip?" "ME!" "Who wants to go running in the stroller?" "ME?" "Who's ready to go night-night?" "NO NIGHT-NIGHT!"

And my favorite "ME!" occurs on the occasions he lets out a nice loud burp. Before anyone else can dare take credit for it, Dominic hollers out "ME! ME!"

On Monday the kids had a field trip to a local bakery, the Great Harvest Bread Company, where they learned all about yeast and milling flour and, Vincent's favorite part, how the milling room has to be explosion-proof because the friction of yeast being milled can potentially cause an explosion. The baker also showed them how yeast "eats" sugar in warm water, and she passed around a bottle full of the mixture and told them to listen carefully.

"You'll hear it burping," she explained, and suddenly Dominic was all ears. As the bottle came our way he grabbed it, held it up to his ear, and with a gigantic grin as the yeast bubbled and burped he yelled out, "ME! ME!"

So if you ever burp around him, don't try and claim it as your own.

We came out of the field trip with yummy bread, free cookies and packets of wheatberries. The kids were especially excited about these. You can eat them -- they're crunchy -- or plant them, which we did. After only four days they'll sprout, and in our humid NC weather the plants will never dry out or die. So the good news is that apparently I have found something for my garden that actually won't die. And you can put the wheat grass in smoothies and omelets.

We also learned some nifty yeast experiments, like using the rising yeast to blow up a balloon. I foresee many an afternoon of the kids clustered around a bottle full of yeast, sugar and water, watching the balloon inflate, and Dominic hopping up and down, calling out, "ME! ME! ME!"

Slinging slime at Prairie Ridge

Since it was a rainy, cold Saturday, we curled up on the couch with hot chocolate and pumpkin muffins and watched "Toy Story 3".

Ha. Not really. It would drive me nuts to sit around on a Saturday. Besides, the kids had already eaten all the pumpkin muffins.

So what we really did was dress in rainboots and rainjackets and head out for a cold, muddy "Bug Safari" at a local ecosystem (I think that "ecosystem" is a fancy way of saying "we don't mow the grass"). Maybe the program wasn't well advertised, or maybe most folks had more common sense than to drag three kids outdoors on a yucky day, but we were the only ones to show up. Thus, the educator to child ratio was 1:1. Which is about what my kids ones need.

In the screened-in outdoor classroom that overlooks bird feeders and a pair of extremely rotund groundhogs, the kids spent time examining live specimens of ladybugs, earwigs, caterpillars and all sorts of other bugs. Dominic jumped from jar to jar hollering "BUG!" Vincent was a little more erudite, asking why different ladybugs had different numbers of spots and why some caterpillars are fuzzy. Catherine busied herself with the colored pencils and stamps.

Then it was time to walk down to the pond. This was where things got fun... as long as you overlook having to control an exuberant almost-two-year-old around large buckets of murky pond water. The naturalists had scooped samples from the pond earlier, and the kids were handed little nets and tasked with mucking around in the buckets to find bugs. Anything alive was transferred to another less-murky tub, and they used plastic spoons to catch the living creatures. And boy did they find them! They found aquatic snails, dragonfly and damselfly nymphs, midges, back-swimmers, water-striders and water scorpions.

It took Dominic approximately seven seconds, once he got his hands on the spoon, to figure out how to use it as a catapult to sling slime everywhere.

Since there was no one else there, everything was very hands-on. The instructor took the kids wading into the pond and showed them a crayfish hole, and was happy to just let them get dirty (as was I). When Dominic tipped over one of the buckets she very calmly instructed everyone to gently pick up all the tiny creatures to save them. I asked questions about European starlings and milkweed and showed her a picture of an odd-looking caterpillar I found a few days ago. I learned more in one hour outside than I could from reading an entire nature book. And meanwhile the kids got dirtier and dirtier and happier and happier.

So now we're home, and the kids are asleep, and since it is still a cold, wet Saturday I am going to curl up on the couch with hot chocolate and the pumpkin muffin I hid from the kids, and watch anything except "Toy Story 3".

Mini Michelangelos

I could subtitle this "What Really Happened to Mom's Makeup."

About a week ago I sent out an email requesting old makeup samples. Not for myself, and, regrettably, not for Catherine, who nevertheless managed to sequester herself in the bathroom and smear lipstick on her eyelids. No, the makeup was for an art project -- specifically to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo's original work just needed some touching up, you know.

If you're not familiar with Michelangelo, he was the sculptor (of David and the Pieta) of 14/1500s Florence. He was immensely talented -- so talented that he lived on commissions from the Medici family and the pope (the Big Guns of the time). One day the pope asked -- more like demanded -- that Michelangelo paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo's response was something along the lines of "Heck no! I'm a sculptor, not a painter -- get Raphael to do it!" but then he bent to the pope's will and picked up a paintbrush. It took four years of isolation, fatigue and physical pain, but we all know the beautiful result.

Well, we're no Michelangelos, but I wanted the kids to think about how you paint upside down, so I taped drawing paper to the underside of a table. My conundrum was that I didn't want paint or colored pencils dropping into their eyes, and then I had a brainstorm -- makeup!

Many thanks to Mom for all her old Clinique samples. An hour later, we had our own masterpiece of butterflies, crosses and some sort of fire-station lights, and it is now gracing our entryway.

Fooling around with waterfowl

In our ongoing quest to do every possible fun activity in North Carolina, yesterday I signed us up to visit the Sylvan Heights Waterfowl Park in Scotland Neck a couple hours away. When I told a friend about it I described it something like this: "We're going to drive two hours to see a bunch of ducks and geese." Luckily Roger just likes being with the family, so he was game (er, fowl?) for anything.

To get to the Park you have to drive miles (and miles and miles) through cottonfields in the poorest county of North Carolina. Seriously, this area was jaw-dropping poor. And it didn't help that debris from the last hurricane formed little mountains on the roadside. So my hopes were not high that this would be anything other than a small pond with a few lackluster ducks.

Well, color me surprised! Before I could even buy the tickets Catherine was holding an hours-old Abyssinian Blue-Winged Goose chick (native to Africa), and Roger was deep in conversation with the lady who built the center with her husband. Turns out they opened the breeding facility next door, in part to rebuild declining waterfowl populations, and the animal world was so impressed that the zoo association gave them a grant to build this world-class facility for visitors. And boy, was it ever world-class. There were so many exotic ducks, geese, cranes, and swans (and birds, too -- toucans, parrots, hornbills, rainbow lorikeets, pheasants, turkeys, kookaburras) that after a while there was a sense of, Oh, another roseate spoonbill... yawn.

The waterfowl populations are divided by continent (South America = colorful, Australia = wacky!), but there are also habitats set aside for endangered populations. The Park has one of the last surviving herds of White-winged Wood Ducks, whose primary breeding ground was destroyed by the 2004 Indonesian tsunami. We saw an emu, watched a toucan snap up grapes, fed Victorian-Crowned Pigeons, almost got bit by a flamingo, screamed at an attacking bird in the African section (there was good reason this guy had his own cage!) and marveled at the fact that there is such beautiful variety in birds and waterfowl. And of course we stood outside the kookaburra habitat and sang the kookaburra song. He didn't laugh.

At the end we bought each child a small stuffed bird that is supposed to make its real call. Catherine selected a robotic-sounding mourning dove she named Vanessa and Vincent chose Woody the Red-Headed Woodpecker (who for some reason slept in the oven of their play kitchen last night). And by consensus, we chose for Dominic a wild turkey.

The kids and their bugs

I few nights ago I got up to let the dog out, and there on the wall was a slug. It's a testament to the kids that my first thought was not, Exterminator! Help! but Cool! I'll just pop this little feller in the handy-dandy bug jar the kids pre-packed at bedtime. 

Millipede

Yes, pre-packed. The day before we had been catching millipedes, and Vincent was quite distraught that we had to release his new pet at nightfall. So he packed his bug jar full of celery leaves and lettuce in eager anticipation of bug-hunting the next morning. I guess he figured it'd save time, because, you know, Mommy would be so darn keen to run out the door and find some bugs.

Holding cicadas

Alas. Morning came a little earlier than either of us expected when I saw the slug at 2 a.m. I scooped him into the jar and went back to bed.

I guess the kids have rubbed off on me. When we see a bug, never do I hear "Yuck!" or "Ew!" Quite the opposite. Dead or alive, the kids -- as do most kids -- have a fascination with the little creatures. I can't count how many books we've read about insects. Vincent is quick to point out the arthropods and to tell me how to figure out the number of legs on a millipede, and Catherine won't allow her bike passage if she spies a caterpillar crossing the sidewalk. No, she has to dismount, find a leaf, and very gently carry the caterpillar to safety. The first thing Dominic does when we go outside is examine the pine trees for cicada shells, and if he finds one he runs to Vincent holding it and hollering "BUG! BUG!"

The kids were so interested in slugs that we performed a Slug Hunt by watering down gravel and placing a tarp on it overnight so we could catch the critters. Then Catherine composed a whole book on slugs, illustrating and writing it herself. Raise your hand if you knew that slugs and snails were related to the octopus!

What I love about this is not just the kids aren't squeamish around bugs, or that they are curious about nature, but that their gentleness and awe shows a sound respect for these squishy little things. I think -- I hope -- that in this awe, they are recognizing bugs as some of the smallest of God's creation, and treating them as such.