I am always trying to find different ways to share books with wingnut. I tried reading ‘The Tale of Peter Rabbit’ to him but he had no interest in it. I went on-line and found these short videos of Beatrix Potter’s works. Some are a moving sideshow and others are part of the animated show. I plan on watching one or two a week with him; hopefully it works
Here is the play list I made.

This month one of the Outdoor Hour Challenges was for twigs. The suggestion was to bring a twig home and observe it and for once wingnut was willing to do it. Woot!
We started out with a walk to get outside. Even though the temperature was thirty-five degrees it was quite warm in the sun.

We took our dog who was overjoyed to come with us

For once he wanted to draw in his nature journal. I was just going to take the twig and point out the different parts but he went to the shelf and pulled out his journal on his own. I had him draw on the notebook page that I got from Handbook of Nature Study’s new ebook. Then, we cut the pictures out and glued them into our journals.

As suggested we put the twig in water to watch the buds bloom.

Here is how I felt about this weeks challenge

For December one of the Outdoor Hour Challenges from Handbook of Nature Study was evergreen trees. Once again wingnut was not interested in this activity, so I decided to pick the tree. At a local park there is a section that has a patch of old Christmas trees and I wanted to find out what kind they were.

On the first trip wingnut had a meltdown and refused to get out of the car. The patch of trees were only a couple of yards from the car so I decided to quickly get some pictures and grab a cone so that when we got home I could try to identify it. Needless to say, in my hurry the pictures were blurry and I got a cone to a different tree; it made it hard to identify.

On the second trip I took my husband with me, which was a good idea. Wingnut saw that daddy was interested in the trees as well so he finally got excited and started looking around to see what he could find.

After researching, we found out that the trees were Noble Fir. But of course my husband already knew that. Once again, I surprised my husband with how little I know about nature.
We looked at the needles and noticed two white lines that go down each needle.

On the ground, under the trees there were denigrated cones. This was one of the key points in identifying this fir.

I took a couple of the scales home to get a closer look. I never realized how beautiful they could be.



Someone had disrespectfully cut down one of the trees. My husband thinks they did it to get some boughs off of it. But because of this, we were able to see how old the trees were; about 16 years old.

One weird-looking thing was these needles that grow on the trunk itself.

And speaking of trunks, this is what the bark looked like.