How Old Is That Tree Mommy????

They have slowly turned the outside table into their display area for all their finds. I have cow bones, bracken mushrooms that are white which we have never seen before. Bird feeders and thanks to the nice Lowe's guy we have tree cut offs. Thought it be a nice time to show them how to count the rings. Since this pic was taken I have an almost complete spinal cord, legs, and skull from a deer. They begged to bring home the dead owl but I was too scared of what it would attract as it was all meaty and not bone. We also found a dead alligator they wanted to drag outta the river and put on the porch. I can't even say, oh well that is a boy for ya cause my little Princess Skyler came away in tears at leaving that gator!!! I just hope everyone who reads this knows my children are BIG TIME animal lovers and would never even harm a bug. They love dead things though. They love bones and guts and anything like that. They feel sad for any animal that has died and I used to have to bury everything. I stress everything including the 23 tadpoles that died one year. I have buried fish, crabs, little birds we found etc etc. They outgrew that but they loves to see bones and all. They love to see how it all works I guess. Curiosity is a good thing! Maybe I will raise a few doctors or vets!!

Winter Wednesday Challenge #1 Color Walk

Well I bought the new Ebook over at Handbook of nature Study Blog and it is really cute. I have never used any of the outdoor challenge books before so this is neat. It is also comes with cute little notebooking pages and ALOT of links!! So the first challenge was basically finding color on a nature walk so that is what we did. We went to our favorite park and just looked all over. Living in FL is not really a wintery state though. We are in North FL so we get cold just no snow. We did have frost a few mornings but me being an anti cold person, we hibernate when it gets frosty lol. I hate snow, I hatye cold and I think I have raised my kids the same. Most of the trees here have pretty much gotten bare except the pine trees and evergreen types. We did however find actual color besides piles of dead leaves and browned grass.






 The lonely red leaf. We saw some leaves most brown and dead but a few still had pretty colors. We also noticed the moss growing on trees was a bright bright green color now. The river water has turned a yellow brown type color,



This bright red bloom was an awesome find. Not quite sure what it is, but it was pretty. We found a whole bush full of them!!! Right above this we also found a long abandoned birds nest which my kids love for some reason. We have always loved finding any kinds of nests. If they are on the ground I will let them bring them home but if they are still in the tree I say leave them cause in the Spring another bird can use it as a home and we can visit again.  

These were on sandbags under the bridge. The kids wanted to break them off but they kept falling apart so we left them there. Maybe another bug will live in them.

 We had a really nice day hunting for colors. The kids were kinda sad about not having snow but I reminded them that in snow we can't ride bikes so they felt a bit better on that lol.

Of course we saw the sky which was a pretty blue that day.