They began with Pokemon and My Little Pony watching.

Then we made double chocolate muffins together.  At the end they put the chocolate chips on top.  “Mama, I don’t have enough.”  “Well, if you have two muffins that each have two on top and you want three on top, then how many more chips do you need?”  “Two!”

There was lego and pony play.

After lunch we headed up to Storm Mountain where we love to hike up to the stream and then climb up and down the rocks in the stream.  On the drive up, Lilah noticed a truck blowing exhaust out of a pipe on the top. “Look, that truck keeps doing that.  Yuck!”  Which led to a conversation about pollution, what pollutes and what doesn’t.  Gavin remarks, “If people want to see the North Pole when it’s all melted they’ll have to build a platform for people.”  Lilah says that to build it without polluting more, they would have to use divers instead of machines.

As we are hiking up the trail, we hear some birds.  Gavin asks, “Mama, is every sound in music a note?”  I try my best to respond and give him a few ideas in answer: Every musical tone is a note.  There are 8 notes and then they repeat.  They are called A through G and that the whole group is called an octave.  And, that everything in a piece of music can be written and read.  “Maybe we can learn how to read music?”  We continue and observe what’s around us.  A grasshopper jumps on my ankle and the kids are fascinated.

They found a nice flat slanted boulder to slide rocks down into the pool below.  They had races and decided big ones moved faster and made larger splashes.  We looked for frogs, but didn’t see any.  We did spot a bird taking a bath in the stream and bobbing up and down.  Lilah called it the bouncing bird.  It was fun to watch it as we moved along behind it.  We kept our eyes out for stinging nettle (We are learning to recognize more plants in our area and that and poison oak are what we started with) and found some beautiful maple leaves to bring home and press.  The leaves are beginning to turn!  Gorgeous!  We watched the clouds swim across the sky and found a new trail down to the car.

A stop at the store and then we came home to dinner with Daddy.  A wonderful day.