Category: Learning New Things!

I am doing an article on rattlesnakes. This summer Momma and Mark discovered their first rattlesnakes. My uncle has a really neat rattlesnake skin mounted on his wall. I thought it would be fun to try to gross Momma out with rattlesnake stories.

Today we learned that rattlesnakes taste like bony greasy chicken.

There is something called Rattlesnake Roundups. People look for rattlesnakes and then they put them in a pit. They take the rattlesnakes and milk them and skin them and cook them.  After “milking” the venom, they use it to make anti-venom somehow.

My Oma told me that my Great Grandfather got bitten by a rattlesnake while picking grapes.  Oma thinks he sucked the venom out and then went into town to get checked.  He was okay. I know that Oma killed a rattlesnake while babysitting her cousins.  My uncle has an unique idea for rattlesnakes.

I was wondering if you have any stories about rattlesnakes? I would like some stories that are kind of funny about when you met a rattlesnake. Have you ever tried eating one?

Chocolate

Chocolate covered

Chocolate covered espresso

Chocolate covered espresso beans

Yum

I was supposed to be writing a cinquain when I came up with that poem.  Our books says a simple cinquain has a line pattern of one, two, three, four, one.  A harder one has 2 syllables, four, six, eight, two.   Here is my cinquain 🙂

Cattleguards

Keeping cows

Away from roads

It reminds me of

Colorado

The first day of snow!

We were walking in the woods and we started to get really cold. Momma said we should head in before we freeze ourselves. As we were heading in, it started to snrain then when we almost to the house when it started to snow!

Now we can sing Christmas songs!

Momma is lighting candles and we are getting some hot chocolate. Is it snowing at your house?

Daddy is going gluten free. He thinks it may be helping his stomach.

While Momma went shopping today I made some gluten free pumpkin spice cookies for him while she was gone.

Here is the no oven needed recipe:

Look for some gluten free paper, a gluten free cookie cutter and gluten free crayons.

Using the cookie cutters, cut out your design. Take some of the GF crayons and decorate it however you want. Sprinkle on some invisible gluten free spices. Let sit for a second or two before eating and enjoying.

Daddy says he is sure to get his fiber this way 😉

We have a mystery at our house!

After our caterpillars make their chrysalis, it appears that something gets inside the chrysalis and eats the forming butterfly. We don’t know what it is, or how it got there.

When I bring the caterpillars their food, I shake the leaves very very good and I check them for bugs or eggs. We rarely notice any bugs other than the caterpillars in the aquarium and we get rid of them as we see them.

Four days ago I found a mystery bug in our aquarium. I thought it just got in somehow. Then I found another one. Today we found another one! We were  looking, and Momma found a chrysalis that was see through and we looked at it and discovered a hole in it! We think the mystery bug came out of that hole.

Do you know what type of bug this is?  We want to learn how to keep them away from our butterfly chrysalis’s. We are hoping that these are the only ones and that we get some butterflies soon.

It has been a bad year for Monarchs. I was only able to raise three from caterpillar stage. I did not find any eggs and saw very few butterflies. We are praying that next year is a great year for them again.

But, we are raising Eastern Black Swallowtails. When we got back from Colorado, Mark went to check our gardens. He said we had some caterpillars on our dill. We researched them and discovered they were Eastern Black Swallowtails.

We found out that they eat anything in the carrot family; like dill, Queen Anne’s Lace, carrots, fennel and parsley. We collected the big ones because the big ones looked like the pictures in our book. We researched the little ones to find out that they were the same caterpillar, they just change three times!

When we brought them in, we cut off as as little as we could from what they were eating, and started feeding them Queen Anne’s Lace.  Momma wanted her dill and fennel for us to eat! They don’t eat as fast as Monarchs, but they eat as much.

Fourteen of them are chrysalises–we have two caterpillars left–but do not know when they will emerge.  If they don’t emerge this fall, they will overwinter and emerge in late April or May. I want at least one to emerge soon. I hope to watch it emerge too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The butterfly on the right is a Monarch. Monarchs do not have the line on their bottom wings and the dots are not in sets of two, they are more scattered.

Monarchs are larger than Viceroys. They also fly differently.  The Monarch glides while the Viceroy flies sort of crazily.

Lastily, Monarchs fly to Mexico in the fall.  Viceroys overwinter in their leaf blanketed chrysalis and emerge in early spring. Monarchs will back and arrive later in  spring. If they are blown off track, they can find their way back.

It is hard to tell the difference.  It is fun to learn enough to tell which is which.

Can you tell me which one is a Monarch and which is a Viceroy? How do you know?

 

My team is undefeated this year!

At the first half, we trouble staying ahead the whole time. Then the second half, we were ahead of them the whole time.  The team we played was a good team and fun to play.

We had fun this year, I think it was our best year!  Momma and Daddy say they wish they could “stack a team” next year and have all of us again.