Two hikes in two days

Well, the first one wasn’t really that long of a hike.  Plus, it was followed by a boat ride in the C&O Canal (By the way, the C&O Canal gets no children’s book love.  I found multiple titles about the Erie Canal but nothing about our own beloved canal.  Just because it’s made of cement and has a song about it!  Well, the C&O has more locks and a really long tunnel, so there!).  But the point is that we spent the vast majority of the last two days outdoors.  Don’t get me wrong, it was excellent!  But I’m completely beat.  I think I will now curl up with the computer and remind myself why I’m a city girl now.

Mushroom and company the boardwalk to Great Falls.

BalletBoy checks out the awesome force of the water.

The first hike was with our co-op group.  We have very loose themes and this was a field trip for water.  Where better to think about water than a place where it has cut through rock and displays its awesome might on a daily basis?  Plus, with the canal that was built to bypass these impassable straits, we get to talk about how people use water and the economic importance of water.  Well, at least, we tried to anyway.  Mostly, we were just hanging out with the water in all its forms and climbing on the rocks.

I don't know how my camera failed to capture the two dozen butterflies that the kids were awestruck by in this picture.

BalletBoy admires the flowers and presents the most amazing discovery: "They're sticky!"

The second hike, with our second co-op, was much longer.  We walked nearly four miles today from the forest to the bay.  We also saw a lot of water on this trip: the streams that fed into the wetlands that fed into the bay, which feeds into the ocean.  However, this group has been studying dinosaurs, so this was actually a fossil hunt on the beach.  There are a number of spots on the Chesapeake Bay where fossils wash up regularly. The kids didn’t find anything of note, but I snagged a bit of some extinct sting ray plate for each them.

Inevitably, at the ocean, some kid will find a beautifully polished rock, which reminds me of the e.e. cummings poem “maggie and milly and molly and may.”  Just a few weeks ago, at homeschool book group, we were discussing the merits of memorizing poetry.  This is one I learned by heart as a kid (for fun – what a dork I was!).  Here it is, just because:

• maggie and milly and molly and may
• went down to the beach(to play one day)
• and maggie discovered a shell that sang
• so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and
• milly befriended a stranded star
• whose rays five languid fingers were;
• and molly was chased by a horrible thing
• which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and
• may came home with a smooth round stone
• as small as a world and as large as alone.
• For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
• it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

Mushroom investigating the water in the bay. Good thing I brought a change of clothes for all of us (me included!).