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".