The wait is over! The house finch birds eggs (situated in the repurposed sugar bowl of our wind chimes) have hatched.
They babies are (sorta) fluffy, (kinda) cute, and (definitely!) hungry.
May I present the baby birds living on our front porch:
Sorry, Mama Bird, for scaring you off when I came out the front door. (Evidently I am not to be trusted.) Thank you for letting me have a moment with your babies. We’re excited to watch them grow up.
Here’s an art appreciation activity that introduces children to famous paintings; sparks conversations about composition, colors, and art imagery; and allows children to create art masterpieces of their own in the form of collage postcards.
I printed out pictures of some of my favorite paintings by Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, and Paul Cezanne for us to cut out and incorporate into our own postcard collages:
Our four year old daughter’s collage featured her own table adorned with flowers and fruit. (The woman in the collage is helping herself to a snack.)
I even made a collage of an outdoor scene:
I find it interested that we started with the same set of paintings and created two radically different collages. I love that there are infinite ways to do any activity. Imagination and creativity are such powerful tools.
At least someone is happy about the gopher that has moved into the neighborhood. She now has fresh piles of dirt to play with every day thanks to its tunneling.
We visited the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits during our visit to LA last month, an activity that turned out to be a formative experience for our daughter:
Since our visit, the grown-ups in our house have taken turns pretending to be animals stuck in the tar while our little saber tooth tiger gently nibbles on us. (Clearly, this is her idea, not ours!)
We’ve also been busy polishing our excavation skills:
In the museum gift shop we purchased this fantastic dinosaur excavation kit
Using a hammer and chisel (contained in the kit), we uncovered a detailed bone replica to clean and then assemble. We bought the Brachiosaurus kit
(Note: the magnifying glass and brush were our own; they’re not included in the kit, but we thought they were essential props for this particular activity.)
Oh, we had such fun pretending to be paleontologists!
Our daughter now refers to her assembled Brachiosaurus as a dragon skeleton since we’ve been reading Dealing with Dragons
Just like last year, we have a birds nest full of eggs on our front porch, situated in a repurposed sugar bowl that’s part of our wind chimes.
Last year’s eggs belonged to a House Finch and were light blue with brown spots:
I’ve been thinking that this year the birds were a different species because the eggs looked so different. Right now these dainty white eggs with brown spots sit in the nest:
(Yes, the egg count is now up to five!)
I’ve finally gotten a glimpse of the parents and the verdict is in… we have House Finches living on our porch AGAIN this year! So much for my theory that the eggs belonged to a different species. I find it fascinating that two birds of the same species can have such radically different egg colors.
I find it even more remarkable that the mother and father birds are both able to fit inside the sugar bowl at the same time, sitting on top of the eggs. The sugar bowl can’t be more than three inches across at most. What little birds! I’m trying my darnedest to get a picture of that for you. (I need to set up a bird blind. There’s no fooling this mama bird!) Stay tuned!
