Snails and beetles

I start work before the boys get up. I make my coffee and often take it with me on my morning rounds. I set up the store, take care of the animals, water the greenhouses, do the laundry and the dishes. The boys get up sometime in there. I get them breakfast.

The other day work just kept coming….phone calls I had to make…..emails to customers I had to answer….restocking the store….it seemed to go on and on. And the boys were so patient, wanting me to finish and do something fun. I try to get it all done by lunch and then do something fun with them after lunch. But this day, it was around 2:30 before I had come close enough to finishing to just quit.

I sat in the backyard with Hugo and Pax and said they had my total attention. I told them we could do anything: a canoe ride, drive to the ocean, go out for ice cream, pick blueberries or work on our fort in the woods….. Anything they were up for.

Hugo didn’t have to think about it even for a second! He said, “Let’s collect a ton of snails and put them in your blender and make snail-smoothies and feed it to the chickens!”

Today we walked through Wesley’s woods down to the river. We hung out by that part of the river where we once saw all those silver fish rushing upstream. Do you remember? Perhaps they were alewives.

Anyway, today we had a bucket and a net. Kim caught this!…

What on earth is it? It was just as big as it looks in the picture and it was diving and swimming all around our bucket. Those blurry things all around it are little fish that Hugo caught.

I wish I had a later picture with all the other things that went into the bucket. I caught an enormous leach that swam around and almost attached itself to that beetle. It was horrible. And totally fascinating.