Satori Smiles

Satori and I took a hike in our big backyard today – James Peak Wilderness area. I knew there’d be flowers in bloom, so we stocked up our sketch pads and some water and hiked in for about an hour. (If we kept going we’d be on the other side of the Great Divide.) We haven’t studied wildflowers yet, but when we do, I’m sure we’ll do it quite thoroughly. Mama’s already planning some of that out!

It was a little windy at times, and I didn’t bring a tripod, but I did snap shots of every flower we passed. Here are some that turned out okay.

Golden Banner (Thermopsis montana) were everywhere.

The Colorado State Flower – Rocky Mountain Columbine or Colorado Columbine (Aquilega coerulea).

These Shooting Stars (Dodecatheon pulchellum) thrived wherever the ground was muddy. Tiny little flowers, we almost missed them.

We found a boulder meadow, selected a nice flat rock and sketched flowers.

I swear she could’ve spent all day here!

In the meantime, Mama took her camera and walked along the meadow fringes.

More Columbines…

Time to head home! Mom was getting a little dizzy from constantly bending over to take all the flower photos.

Chiming Bells on our way out…

Now that we are more familiar with our birds, it is very obvious when a rare-to-our-backyard bird visits us. This is a Black-headed Grosbeak. Look at that big (gros) beak!  A male and female pair were at our birdfeeder over the weekend. Next time I will try to get a better picture, this was taken from inside my kitchen, through a window and into our forest.

And of course I couldn’t resist this pretty little girl…

So I’ve had this nature journal laying around. It isn’t the easiest to find, so I wanted to wait until Satori was ready to write in it. She begged to have it and finally I relented and gave it to her. I’m so glad I did!

She works on it every day. She’s adapted her handwriting to fit in its tiny spaces obviously made for older children/adults. She talks about her own children and how one day they will read it, and in her journal entries, she writes about this. She’s so super proud of her book.

Here is her very first entry, on the American Robin. You can click on the photos to see larger images.

The Robin one is hard to decipher, but it goes like this (spelling and grammar mostly corrected):

Robins have the most pretty colors in the world. It is bright brown and some dark red on the belly and gray feet. They like to be on the ground in Wisconsin. They like to eat worms. They have a beautiful voice and they fly out to get out of danger. They have long beaks and their beaks are sharp. When Robins need to warm up they fluff up their wings. They build their nest with horse hair and man hair and mud which warms the eggs up and the eggs have their mom to warm them up too with her nice furry coat.

When you see robins that means it is spring. Robins are not one of the smartest birds in the world but they are kinda smart and they nest in branches that you can’t reach them. If they nest in little trees you can reach the branches.

Robins build their nest with mud. Their eggs are blue…

Here’s one she finished last week about the King Bird.

My favorite part is this:

Kingbirds do an amazing thing. Here is what they do. When they (see a hawk) they would just get into a fight. Isn’t that amazing? Kingbirds have a yellow belly. It has a red patch on the top of the crest, black tail, and a dirty gray breast. They have a sharp bill, brown wings with a little bit of white. It likes to sit on telephone wires… has gray legs and a light blue back, white throat. (….)

Ask your mom to show you a picture of a kingbird. There’s a teeny bit of blue on the wing, the rest is brown just like I just told you. Black pupils… curved stripes in the tail. Sound goes like this – kip song, kip song, kip song.

Ask your mom to teach you about birds. You will learn about so many birds. I learned a lot of bird. Soon you will be an ornithologist and you will love being that kind of person. When you grow up, teach your children and soon they will write about birds too. When you’re seven you should read this book to your mom and dad. They will be so surprised that they will buy you a present. When you’re nine you start to make your own breakfast. I started when I was five.

The past few weeks were for the birds… Satori and I went on several hikes and went birdwatching. We have put out new bird feeders on our deck. We’re going to start to watch The Life of Birds DVD from Netflix soon… Last week we added some bird books to our library. The only bird identification books I had before this month was specific Colorado bird field guides. So I picked out a nice selection of books that should help me learn more. Mama got some for herself…

as did Satori…

I had stumbled across this very cool WhatBird Make-a-Guide (MAG) feature that allows you to print out your own bird books. After trying a few demo books that were emailed instantly (limited to 5 birds each), I then got a 3-month subscription ($9.95) for as many books as I wish, and can add 900 birds each. I added these pages to Satori’s Bird Book journal, and also used this to create my own flashcards. To do this, I chose their 6×9 inch 2 pages per bird book. Once I noticed that the odd pages had full pictures of the bird, I knew it would be a cinch to create my cards. I printed out only the odd pages, 4 pages per printed page, and pages 4-85. I then cut out each bird photo, and laminated 5 photos per page.

I ended up with 25 pages of birds!

I then cut them, rounded off their corners, punched a hole in the upper left corner, and now they are all held together by this handy ring. The below collection are the birds Satori has studied so far in her Burgess Bird book.

The ones we haven’t studied yet are in their own ring.

Here is a side view so you can see how many birds we have to learn yet! There’s approximately 100 birds covered in our book.

We also have had our kitchen computer set to Phoebe the Hummingbird and Molly the Barn Owl web cams. Both were due to have their eggs hatch this week. Unfortunately, poor Phoebe’s eggs were not viable. We had been watching these two eggs for a few days… One looked like it had a peck hole in it, but there had been no movement for a long time.

Then yesterday, all of a sudden Phoeoe went on defense mode, whirring about. Soon, the culprit showed his face, a monster Godzilla lizard! (Actually, he was probably a very small lizard, these eggs are the size of peas or tic-tacs.) Phoebe successfully drove him off until he fell off the branch. Sadly, the second she returned to her nest, she used her beak to flip one of the eggs out of the nest. People were saying it wasn’t viable anyway and its smell attracted the lizard.

And today, people are all saying the second egg is not viable. Phoebe left her nest alone most of last night and is leaving it for too long a period.  The color doesn’t look like there is a bird growing in it (or so people say). So this was a tragic but enlightening view of a life of a hummingbird.

So now our interest turns to Molly, the barn owl with her five eggs. This morning we listened to a live discussion with the owner and a 4th grade class. We learned that he put out this owl box two years ago, and it cost him about $4500 to get it all set. Then they had to wait… and wait… Only after a windstorm this January of 2010 did Molly and McGee (the male) make the box their home. The owners were ecstatic! The eggs were laid a month ago and the first is due to hatch probably within the next 24 hours.

Does anyone know what the heck these eggs are? We were walking around Lily Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park today and I promised I’d try to find salamanders for Satori (she’s fascinated with them)… I turned over a rock and found these dotted eggs! (Click for larger detail.)

Anyway, we had a wonderful day spent with my Aunt Marge! We drove all around the flatlands, foothills and finally mountain area.

It was a beautiful day, with many yellow Aspens, and gorgeous scenery. Can’t wait to drive further west in Colorado this weekend!

to a little girl who never sees fall leaves… Sorry if we always take pictures of outgoing cards before the receiver gets them, but I love to document them.

Up here at 9000 feet in the mountains, we do not get to see rich reds and oranges in the trees, only vivid gold aspen leaves. And of course we see the greens of the evergreens. But it only takes 30 minutes to get low enough to find some of the colorful leaves!

Here’s sending some of that color to a little girl who doesn’t get to see the autumn color near her home… This is the same leaf we took a picture of a few days ago down in Lyons, Colorado, pressed and hopefully will be enjoyed a bit longer. The color faded a bit before we pressed it, but it’s still very pretty.

Satori wanted to write this letter, I had nothing to do with the sentences except to help her spell them. (And I didn’t help too much, I seem to have forgotten a word, hehe.) She’s come so far from the time we first started sending out pen pal letters. In the spring, I will probably not have to help her do anything to write her letters!

My memories of growing up were full of nature and outdoors. Running around with my younger brother Kenny, all day long we explored the woods and fields on our family’s farm in Wisconsin. Even though we didn’t know the scientific names of the creatures and flora (or even the normal names most of the time), we saw such fascinating things… Our backyard was a huge alfalfa field, so flowers and insects were everywhere. We’d take a walk back in the valley and our 20 dogs and cats would follow, scattering hundreds of little yellow butterflies on the road. Plums and berries and veggies from the garden made delicious treats. Corn silk made little spaghetti “meals” for our pretend play. In the fall acorns and leaves littered the ground, we could make huge leaf piles and I can still smell the old leaves… In the winter we made the HUGEST snow forts! We sledded down big hills where my dad would lay down tracks with his tractor. I loved every minute of it.

While I don’t have any photos from that time of our huge outdoor playground, here’s a few taken last year.

The house we grew up in… Which we’ll be visiting in a few weeks to see Grandma and Grandpa!

Satori and my dad walking in the fields… All the land you see (and much, much more) was the lands we explored as little kids…

In this day and age most kids are plugged in to their TVs and computers. We try our best, although we’re going to try harder now to get out and appreciate the outdoors and nature! We moved to the Colorado mountains and have 6 acres of land, bordered by National Forest on one end, and a mountain stream on the other, hiking trails everyewhere… so there’s no excuse.  All spring and summer I’ve been collecting Colorado bird, tree, insect, flower, etc. identification books.

It is a bit overwhelming to want to know what every single natural item is though, so that is my goal to learn together with Satori as she grows up. These four books will assist in that and be the motivation for us to take daily nature walks!

Handbook of Nature Study  by Anna Botsford Comstock was written way back in 1911, but is just as relevant today. You can read it free online. In fact, there is a blog dedicated to exploring Handbook of Nature Study and has opened up to Outdoor Challenges for everyone!

I want to be a bit more prepared, so I want to read up a bit, figure out the perfect nature journal for Satori and I, and then I’ll for sure start blogging about our nature studies!

We think a mountain lion was in our yard two nights ago. David recorded the sounds it was making, and it sounded like a mountain lion when we compared it to sound recordings online. I am a light sleeper who sleeps with her window open even in winter, so I estimate I hear this sound once every few months, but this time it was at 9:30pm when the entire family was still awake.

Game Camera

We don’t know 100% what it was, but it was some sort of big cat! Next summer, I’ll be sure we have one or two of these game cameras, so when an animal goes by, flash! It will be caught on camera. Can’t wait to see all the critters prowling around our property. So far, I’ve gotten good photos of bear, fox, raccoon on our deck, and moose and bobcat within a few miles of our house.

This one might be nice too:

http://www.amazon.com/Moultrie-Infrared-Camera-Built-Viewer/dp/B0010ER8JG/ref=tag_dpp_lp_edpp_ttl_in

People RAVE about this art program, and so I’ve been preparing to start Artistic Pursuits with Satori. Artistic Pursuits is our neighbor in Arvada, CO, so we got our materials the day after we ordered! They feature a creative art curriculum from preschool to high school. It isn’t just copy what the teacher has in mind for you, I believe it will really bring her creativity out as we get into the program. Of course, the Preschool book was the one we cracked first – for ages 3-5. “The Way They SEE It” offers 32 projects, and is a great intro for preschoolers. Peppered within the book are “grown-up talk” to help the parents understand their child’s artistic development.

First activity was examining a bouquet of flowers by an artist. Then Satori and I went on a short hike around our property and picked out a bunch of wildflowers. I had no clue there were so many flowers around in August! The flowers are different than the orange and purple ones that were dominant in June, these were mostly yellow and white. Hummingbirds, bees and butterflies whizzed, buzzed and fluttered around us.

Within minutes we had our very own bouquet. We made a composition with a few common things around our house, lying at the foot of the vase, just like the illustration in our book. Finally, we set it outside on our deck and prepared to draw it.

This purple thistle flower caught our eye with one of our walks with Justin and Senaca yesterday, so one bud, *had* to go in our bouquet. I’d love to revisit the batch for more photos…

Within seconds, we had visitors! Several hummingbirds…

One of our cheeky little squirrels…

Ok, on to the art! We almost never use crayons anymore, but this lesson called for them, so we looked forward to working with the primitive glory and color of a bunch of Crayolas!

Whenever I mention “ART”, Satori gets very intimidated for some reason. She can color all day long, but when I want to “do some art”, she says she can’t draw flowers. Same thing today. So I did draw along with her today, and I did some rough sketches of just scribbles. Her first picture copied my style, oops. I really did just scribble, but was hoping to show her that she could do better than me!

Eventually she got more courageous and actually drew some flowers. And a blue hummingbird and bee!

“Bouquet of Flowers on a Ledge” by Satori, age 4.

Waiting for us after we finish this book, or perhaps at the same time, is the K-3 books. There is a set of 3: An Introduction to Visual Arts”, “Stories of Artists and Their Art” and “Modern Painting and Sculpture”. We have the first two, missing only the painting/sculpture book. I will be sharing our projects as we explore the Artistic Pursuits curriculum. I myself LOVE to look at artwork by children.