nature

We spent the afternoon outside yesterday. Lucas and I basked in the sun, idly peeling the seeds out of their wings (Wikipedia tells me they’re called samaras; Raspberry has been calling them “flying fruit” and she’s been obsessively picking them off the ground, peeling them as she walks down the street — it makes our walks very long and sometimes annoys me when she’s taking forever to get down the street or gets distracted by peeling while crossing an intersection). We amassed a pile of seeds, which Raspberry would collect, “plant” and water. While I was picking the samaras off the ground, I noticed that due to the laws of physics, many of them had fallen seed-down, with the wings up in the air and the seeds embedded within the grass. The cleverness of it all blows my mind. Nature is awesome. Evolution is awesome.

Oh, on a related naturey-sciencey tangent, Raspberry’s been into all sorts of animals and insects in the past few months. It’s interesting that she’s no longer squarely focussed on just one animal (it was meerkats for over a year, although cats have always been her one true love). Her more generalized interest means that I’ve been putting a lot of my sociobiological/animal-behavior/anatomical knowledge to good use and I’ve also been learning so much from the animal books we’ve been getting from the library (did you know that certain species of ants take other ant species as slaves? Or that larval dragonflies are born in the water, breathe through their tails and take two years to mature? Yeah, I didn’t know these until recently). This is the part about unschooling that excites me the most — getting to learn all this cool stuff alongside Raspberry. Of course, it works out because I like this stuff too. The stuff that might not interest me as much will be [ahem] more challenging, I’m sure. But before that happens, I’ll just continue revelling in all the fun animal stuff she’s into.