Nature walk(s away)

After my morning walk (and my legs are not so sore today), I got myself ready and took the boys to Plantation House – just for something interesting for them to do. They are at home most days, so sometimes I feel sorry for them (and feel guilty), so we take a drive. They ran around the field, we had a little picnic, did a bit of school by way of Caleb reading from the library books I had brought, then I read them two books, and then they played some more. It’s nice for them to have the run of the field. Two of the tortoises were mating…or at least, the male was trying to have his way while the much smaller female kept walking away. Very interesting to happen upon that bit of nature though! The male has quite a loud voice, I discovered. Then we took a walk through Plantation Forest, the first time I’ve just done it with the boys. I wasn’t nervous to start with, but I can understand now how woods can be really scary, particularly at night on your own (not that I was). It was the first time I’ve actually heard trees groaning and creaking, and then the occasional branch would snap, and bamboos were rubbing against one another, and looking up to the tops of the trees I got the feeling that they wanted to fall over, they were swaying so severely. Our walk was of the longer variety, probably at least 1 km, maybe more, but very good. I told the boys to look for interesting things, and they found moss, bark, flowers, roots, and many sticks for hitting trees with. All in all, very educational.

Nick decided that he was going to help me with the painting and wanted to get started right away, so that’s what we did. We finished a big upstairs section – the part outside Nick’s office – and wow, what a dramatic difference. That whole area is so bold and bright, it’s quite a deep peach when it’s on a wall, but really looks good. It went very quickly with both of us doing it. Caleb likes to be involved in “making plans”, so when Nick mentioned that he’d like to get a sign for his door, Caleb quickly went off to make one (not quite what Nick had in mind). It says “prst nec”. You have to sound this out very carefully…p ar s ta – get it?