Nature Girl

Thank you so much to those of you who left sweet "blogoversary" comments on yesterday's post!

I know that bloggers are not *supposed* to care about how many comments they get or how many followers they have, but I'm sure I am not alone in feeling energized and uplifted by positive visitors and their willingness to share their thoughts with me!

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Today I enjoyed the unprecedented pleasure of a day alone, in peace and quiet.

My husband took the girls to his aunt and uncle's house, to visit with his brother and sister who are in from out of town.  He graciously agreed to give me some "alone time," which added up to almost five hours!  I was almost giddy.

I made a quick stop at the craft store (because, of course, that's always the first thing I do with some free time), and managed to get out of there spending less than $9 (again, unprecedented!). 

Then I headed to the library to pursue my latest project...nature!

In reading Last Child in the Woods (mentioned in my last blog post), I was feeling terribly uninformed about natural science, so I hit the shelves and got several books from the children's section.  I find that when I want to start reading about a topic that feels unfamiliar, it is helpful to start at kid-level, and then work my way up to the more complicated texts aimed at adults.  There is a lot less pretension and complexity in the kid texts; I can tackle that in the grown-up books once I'm sure I'm really ready to pursue the topic!

I spent a long time in the afternoon reading through the books, happily discovering that I am not nearly as ignorant of the major facts of natural science as I had feared!  It helps to see all the information presented in one place, though, so I can think about fun and interesting things to share with my girls when we are out in nature together.  And, don't get me wrong, there is still plenty of new information for me to soak up, too!

Wanting to "put my money where my mouth is," as they say, before I hunkered down on the sofa to check out my new library books, I pulled on my snow boots and headed down the street on a little nature walk.

There is a little park with a playground down the road that I have taken the girls to only a couple of times.  In the summer, I make all kinds of excuses because of mosquitoes and mud and safety issues related to poor visibility from the road.  In the middle of winter, none of these things is an issue, so I headed down to the park to see if it might be a fun place for the girls to do some nature exploring outside of their own backyard.

Look at this place!  Can you believe that I've been missing out for six years!

Look at the enormous trees dwarfing the playground equipment.  Complete with a babbling brook, this little park is truly an oasis in the middle of suburbia.

I absolutely love the sound of running water, so when I heard the sound of the creek rushing past the rocks, I took a little video so I could share the sounds with you.  Sadly, I can't get it to upload to my blog, so I guess a little more research is in order!  You may be lucky, though:  You might have gotten dizzy!  I panned around a lot, so I could get the full effect of how this place sits right in the middle of a suburban residential area.  I now know to move the camera around a bit slower!  Maybe I will be able to figure out how to share videos in the future.

I will be making a return visit to this park soon, you can be sure!

I saw this little guy in a neighbor's yard during my walk:

Craft store, nature walk, reading, nap....and then two girls and a husband, happy to see me when they returned home...a very happy winter day!

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If you haven't seen me around in the Comments section of your blog lately, and I usually show up there once in a while, it is because I am getting frozen out of a LOT of comment pages recently. 

Either the page freezes, and I have to restart my computer,

or I am taken off to a white page, and nothing ever appears. 

I am not ignoring you! 

I am continuing to read and enjoy all of my usual blogs,

but there are several that I haven't been allowed to comment on. 

I hope this will clear up SOON!