Outdoor day

A gorgeous day here and even quite warm. We decided to head out for another walk around our neighbourhood and headed off in a direction we hadn't for a while. The kids wanted to bring paper and pens and Danielle drew a map of of all hers friends and families houses.

Nathan pounced on a bunch of leaves and piled them in a "boat with a sail".

All in a row at 9.45am

(and then we play a game of jumping on each other's heads)
After stopping at the dairy for some fresh fruit, we wandered up to look out at the sea while eating our morning tea (and had a fantastic view of the South Island).

I stopped and noticed a lot of wild weeds and plants on our walk and was good to get in touch with what's in our neighbourhood again.

All in a row at 11am.

(and inspired by Stephanie's blog post, we will be investigating making a sundial someday soon when time allows).

Nathan was whacking around a long flax leaf that he found and after a while noticed a pungent odour released from it when it had been sufficiently beaten. We discussed how oils are extracted from many plants and flowers and suggested that he collect a variety of things to take home and pound to see what sort of smell comes out. Once home he gave them a bash around with a stone he bought home.

The results weren't very nice smelling (and he was disappointed that a lot of oil wasn't coming out and just seemed to be on the end of the stone!), so I suggested some garden herbs instead - much more pleasant!

I then had an idea from a homeschooling friend I was chatting on the phone last night whose daughter was wanting to distill some dirty water while I was on the phone to her. So we decided to attempt to rig up our own experiment to see if it would work. I suspect summer would be better, but also need to actually look up some instructions to figure a better way perhaps (I just worked in based on the cloud and rain experiments we did last year). We had a little condensation forming and running into the bowl, but not a lot (and one would be extremely thirsty by the time it had finised LOL!).

After lunch me and Danielle were flicking through one of our books and she asked what one of the pictures was. It was a flower press so I explained what it did and she raced off to collect some flowers from the garden. Since we don't have a press, we did the heavy-book-version.

I then felt like getting into my herb garden and giving it a bit of a tidy up. So trimmed and pruned a few plants (I'm sure the season is ALL wrong for doing that, but never mind), even transplanted a few that have since been crowded out by some very large herb plants (I really hope I haven't killed them off by doing that).
Here were the flowered oregano stems I chopped off.

The kids were out helping me and then moved on to filling the paddling pool and torturing each other with icy cold water.

We then headed over to Grampy's mid afternoon and Nathan asked Grampy how the canal systems worked (we'd been talking about the Panama canal for some reason). So Grampy being a real-life MacGyver had just the thing. In a couple of minutes he had set up a couple of large tubs, a water pump (hello! who just has a water pump lying around waiting for this question?) and showed in a kind-of-similar way how the water fills the locks and allows the boats to be transferred across land.

So it was a fun-filled day and just had that nice flow about it. I really wanted to get stuck into making some soap with the kids, but that will need to be another day!