More birds spotting

We have spotted more birds. The first one, the cardinal is actually a bird we see quite often, other than robins.



But this one, I didn't see it at all at first. But it sure is a beauty! Any one know what kind of bird this one is? By the time I went outside, he's already gone. Good thing I have a powerful zoom.

Bird spotting

Anyone know what bird this is? We saw her this morning and loved observing it in action. I looked in www. enature.com/fieldguides to help me identify it but no luck. Is she little chubby or possibly prego? Of course, it can also be a he.









The color looks much more true in my camera. This was taken through our screen. I was afraid she might be scared if I opened the screen but she stayed for a quite a while. See the blue on the tip of the feathers and the orange hue on her tummy?

Easy day (jump rope)

As we are pretty much done for the year, except for math, we took it light today. The kids practiced jumping rope and J did backward jump and re-learned how to jump with a 2 feet together. She also tried to cris-cross the jump rope but did not totally succeed. We have also been riding bike to our tot lot whenever the weather allows and spending more time outside.

Prime played with tan grams again and he did much better this time around. We are also done reading "Anne of Green Gables". Next on our list is "Heidi", but the kids has been reading and re-reading some of their favorite books. A new favorite seem to be the book J picked out, "Rapunzel" by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. But as always, J and Prime love to play with each other and J is my master inventor of games. Prime loves all of J's made-up games and characters. It amazes me the kids have so much imagination. I hope they will keep this gift for a life time.

J has been loving my practice knit and has been wearing it to sleep and put it on her head regardless of what she wears. :)

This is our lucky find for the day from nature; a robin's egg shell, complete with feather. :)

birds, nature calls and friends

Today, we saw a bird with a red speck. The red really stands out. We also saw a bird with deep green blue head, didn't capture on camera as I was driving. But it was really pretty. I'm glad we are seeing more variety than just the robin though we are fascinated by them tow. We saw one pooping on our deck this morning. :) They are a pretty regular fixture on our deck though I don't think they used our grill for a nest that is sitting out all year round. :) That would actually be nice as we hardly use the grill.


There is the red bird. When the picture is larger, the red stand out a lot more. Bird nest inside thorn bush. Too bad there was no bird egg.

Plant that looks like a caterpillar. Prime learning about earth quake. Their hot little hand made the cap move.


This is what we saw in a parking lot. The pigeon was not scared and came for the bag. Looks like he is doing ballet in the 2nd picture.

J acting like a protective mommy the whole time with K at the playground. She held her most of the time and was not interested in playing with Prime. Usually, she will always find a friend or two, and normally they will be girls and all the girls tend to want Prime to be the bad guy and he really doesn't like that. LOL. But he is okay if its just regular tag.

I was going to upload a video but it seem to take forever... maybe I will try again later. I don't know what animal is making these sounds. Crickets, frogs? As you can see, I'm learning about nature as much as the kids. :)

painting

Today was so cold that our original plans to go outside after J girl came back from school got squashed. W boy showed J girl a snowflake he had cut earlier in the day and J girl wanted to do one as well. After that, she wanted to paint her snowflakes and thus J/W started the over 1hour painting session. Here are some of their painting (all paints by stockmar):


This is J girl's painted snowflakes. This is another one of her work. All the colors are made mixing red, yellow and blue.


Here is one W boy made. The camera don't quite capture how pretty the painting really is.

Below are a strange phenomenon W boy and I observed this afternoon. Massive # of birds flying in our neighborhood. I'm not sure where they came from. See how many there are? There are actually even more, but lots flew away.