Loving nature

     One of the perks of living where we do is that we have free access to a couple of nice parks in the area. With our busy lives, we don't take enough advantage of them as we could, but we try hard to remedy this.
      Briar Bush is a park/nature exposition setting where few animals are partially caged for kids to see. These animals have long days outside their cages, so it's definitely not a zoo kind of setting. It is also MUCH smaller than a zoo, there are no fancy lions or elephants. It's a nature center where little kids can learn about animals. There are some snakes and cockroaches that are always in boxes, but all the turtles, pigeons, frogs, spend most of the days in the wild and are "caged" once in a while for "academic" purposes. The place also has an area with probably a hundred different bird feeders. Needless to say, 10 minutes of bird watching puts you face to face with tens of wild bird species while you can read information and cool facts about them. People who work at Briar Bush take some animals (cute rodents, little birds) for day trips to daycares and schools around the area to teach kids about nature. Catalina loves these encounters and she asked us several times to take her there.

So, here we are, on a Saturday morning!

Aside from this, we take often "nature" walks as Catalina likes to call them. This means that while we walk we talk about flowers and leaves and bugs. Catalina knows a lot of things and she is happy to teach us! 

A closer park is just a nice place of dog free (Thank you!!!!) trails, with a nice playground, a cute mini golf course, a real golf course, a pond and few picnic tables. We see deer, squirrels, chipmunks and lots of geese there. Catalina likes the playground, but lately she was very interested in going there to catch insects to study them under the microscope. She also started a feather collection, and with so many geese there, there is never a shortage of feathers.

Get that bug, daddy!

We returned home with a nice collection of 3 ants, a flower, few leaves and some other "nature" stuff. Catalina has a hand held microscope that can be connected to a computer and you can see the magnified image on the screen. We never connected it, even though we had for almost 2 years. It was a very nice surprise to see Catalina excited about it. We started by looking at feather and rocks....

 just to move on to human subjects!

 Catalina loved seeing her hair on the screen. She is a lot of fun to be around, and we are lucky to have some friends who enjoy her and play very nicely with her as well.

Sometimes, there is all one needs, good, quiet laughs. We've had a few :)