Christmas Picnic

Catching up with my sister and her family at Carss Bush Park. We had a good play and a nice swim, although the girls weren't so keen on the squishy mud. Burrowing down with my toes, I found some decent sized live cockle shells for the boys to examine, and later, looking for shells amongst the oysters on the water's edge, we found some very interesting hermit crabs.

Greenfields Beach

A long drive through Kangaroo Valley, then a fun afternoon playing at the beach with my brother: learning to use a surfmat, finding crabs amongst the rocks and building a sandcastle.

The trip home was not as uneventful as we might have wished. A broken throttle cable component resulted in a three hour wait in the dark for a tow truck and an exciting drive home. An unexpected late night adventure which we did our best to enjoy.

New Silkworms.

(Dictated and photos by Waratah)

Yesterday we picked up our silkworms.
Today, one has started building a cocoon.




There are four more who are hungry.

We picked some mulberry leaves for them. We have four different mulberry trees. We want to find out which leaves the silkworms like best.

The English mulberry has very fuzzy leaves. The White mulberry has small leaves which are lighter coloured.


The Boy mulberry has flowers but never fruit. The Girl mulberry has lots of fruit. Their leaves look the same but I think they smell different. They are big and shiny. We snipped the stems off the leaves from the Girl mulberry so we could tell them apart.

We put the five caterpillars in the box with the four types of leaves. We will check back later to see which ones they like the most.




We put the caterpillars in their box with the leaves and some boxes for building cocoons in. The caterpillar who was building his cocoon started moving around more. We wonder if he is hungry and will stop building his cocoon to eat?

UPDATE
Here are the leaves we tested. The English Mulberry was the most popular. We wonder if that was what the silkworms were used to? When we breed our own silkworms, we will test them again as babies.

2012 Term 4 Week 8

Most of week 8 was taken up with the excursions depicted in the previous posts. Other activities included:

Helping Daddy fly his remote control helicopter.

Making beaded Christmas presents.

Mulga "reading" to Boronia.

Boronia's first taste of solid food - apple puree.

Boronia deciding that she really likes solid food.

Mummy cuddles.

Waratah made a Golden Eagle Christmas card for Daddy. He crumpled it up to throw away when the paper tore (due to an excess of glue), but eventually allowed himself to be convinced that all was not lost, and it was resurrected.

Boronia playing with the Schatzii kaleidoscope app on the iPad.