First Day at the Beach

The beach opens up into the big blue everywhere. It's fun to be in the water! We love it! Look at the sand. All the little stones are different colors - red, blue, grey, brown. The lifeguard tells people what to do, and keeps watch to keep the people safe. What if there were no lifeguard? That would be fun because we don't like to be told what to do. But that would not be safe. It wouldn't be fun to be in trouble with nobody there to help us. What if we bumped our heads and couldn't swim? A lifeguard has a job to do. Maybe one day some of us will become lifeguards. And tell the swimmers what to do. Until then we will just have fun at the beach.

Oh! Look at those clouds. They are dark. That means it looks like rain. The wind is picking up and blowing more. All the people are packing up. The children and mamas and daddys and grandmas and grandpas. It's time to wash our feet in the shower. How does it turn on? Push the button and water comes out. This is fun too. Bye bye, beach.

Splitting wood

Outdoor activities rule the roost when the weather cooperates. Today we learned about splitting logs.

A huge tree fell across the road a few weeks ago, and it's gradually been disappearing into woodpiles, firepiles, but most of it has been languishing by the side of the road waiting to be split. Well, today was the day. Uncle Phil came with the neighbor's hydraulic splitter, attached to the farm tractor. The wedge went through three foot diameter logs like butter. Everyone got to take a turn at the splitter, and we all drank lots of water afterwards.
Its hard to imagine how heavy trees really are when they stand so easily above us.

After the tree fell, it knew immediately that the end of its life had come. The leaves shrank and sank sorrowfully. The tree had rotted at its base, probably over many years, and the strong winds of our recent storms simply took it down. We were lucky that it did not fall on our building. A visitor actually watched it fall from his seat inside. It slowly started to topple, hesitating, then suddenly continued into the crash, decisively.

We will use it for firewood next winter. And the stack of newly split wood to the east is quite beautiful right now.

Springtime has come so quickly and we have been so busy here at the Farwell School. There's simply so much to do and see now when the weather's so warm and lovely. Everytime you turn around, the plants seem to grow by the foot.

New baby animals appear each week. Geese nested and hatched a flock of goslings in the south pond. On May 18 we spotted a newborn fawn and its nervous attentive mother - she seemed to be pretty young herself, and kept leading the fawn across the road. Mallard ducks hatched a batch of ducklings, and the ubiquitous robins have nests here and there, including one over our west deck. The babies from that nest just learned to fly, and we found one preening its scraggly feathers outside the window.

Toads bring friendly energy to visit when we find them. We can pick them up and feel their bumpy skin before letting them go again. We found a couple Mole Grasshoppers and kept them in our Bug Habitat for few days.

Our baby mollies are still small, but growing too. It's hard to keep the tank filled with water. Why does it evaporate? Why do we get thirsty? Where does all the water go?