Farm Schooling: Arthropods, Melons, and Poison Ivy

 The boys informally kicked off our science unit on arthropods with this cute and fairly typical pose. They spent about 20 minutes observing a praying mantis and commenting on it. Asking questions of themselves about why she walks this way and delighting in her ability to climb slippery things like plant pots. 

They spent a bunch of time trying to catch her on camera turning her head towards them. They thought she was observing them almost as much as they were observing her. 

While we shuffled pots around we found a large toad hiding behind them.

Another day brother M sighted a beetle that he had not seen before and put it in a jar so that he could see it while looking it up in our Beetles of Eastern North America book. 

And another observation of a scary looking cutworm type caterpillar. 

Miss L finally harvested two melons this week and we had them for dessert almost immediately after they were harvested. 

We let Miss L and brother S each have a whole half of the smaller melon since they have taken such good care of them. 

It's been a busy week on the farm. My part of the barn is finally done -- will post all about it as soon as the gutter guy finishes his part. We have been cleaning the house every day this week.  A little less intensely than our Spring cleaning in April since baby A is being juggled in the mix. The kids have done a great job.  They cleaned the basement on Monday, the toy room on Tuesday&Wednesday, and their bedrooms Thursday & Friday (huge lego mess).

I tidied up the nature collection shelves in our home library. Now each one has its own shelf. There are shelves for rocks and minerals, bugs, birds, marine life, and seeds/leaves. 

During the pandemic we spent about 5 months with no access to the local library.  We were there on the last night it was open stocking up on books, but we had no idea it would go on for months. Normally, we get about 100 new books every other week.  We own a lot of books. But I have tried to limit it somewhat since the library also has great collections and we could get almost any book from there. 

Fast forward to about 3 months into the pandemic, it got to a point where our kids were wandering around our home library every night, perusing shelves and opening cupboards, hoping for something new to read. I gave up on trying to limit our collection. We started ordering a lot of books on thrift books. Hubby and I introduced them to several new (to them) book series that we had read and enjoyed  as kids and also not so long ago. Our collection barely fit in the home library before so we added a "library annex" in one of the cosy upstairs landings to organize the spillover.  Of course, I didn't think of taking a picture of the annex until just now (dark), but you get the idea.  

Hubby did a bunch of yard work on Monday including weed wacking. On Tuesday his eye was a little sore, thought might be a sty. By Wednesday it was quite puffy and he made an appointment with his regular physician for a telemedicine consultation. By then it looked like this:

He had some mild rashes appearing on other parts of his body and the doctor and he were pretty positive that it was poison ivy.  He got some medicines (antihistamine, poison ivy cream, and an antibiotic "just in case" his eye needed it). Thursday and Friday the eye was almost completely swollen shut. He led M's cub scout den meeting on Thursday and used it as a demo of "this is what poison ivy rash looks like"!

By Saturday his eye was a lot less swollen, but his arm was worse:

And then today his eye is mostly back to normal, but the skin around it is still red and irritated looking. His arm looks even worse -- like serious poison ivy.   We think that his weed wacking sprayed the ivy oil on him and gave him the serious primary rashes and then he rubbed it on a bunch of other places where he also has smaller rashes.