Daddy, do you have tentacles?

So said miss5 as I was driving along.

Me: No, I don't have tentacles like an Octapus.

Miss5: I mean like when a dog licks itself, like on grandad's cup. Do you have them?

Oh. Testicles.

Please don't
I told you not to :~) Read more...

Albatrosses

Forgive us our absence! We are currently on holiday in the North Island of our beautiful country, but will be home before we know it. Merl is up here for work, so this time we all decided to tag along and catch up with friends and family living in the capital.

But this post is not about Wellington - that will wait for another time! This is all about our trip to the Albatross Colony that is just out of our home town. This was another of those brilliant home-educating 'school trips', organised by one of the other home edding parents in town - like our trip last year to the Aquarium.

The kids started off in the 'education room' had a wonderful introduction to the birds who live/visit/nest on the headland (from left, the Yellow Eyed Penguin, the Spotted Shag, the Stewart Island Shag, the Little Blue Penguin, the Red-billed Gull and the Northern Royal Albatross). We discussed which were endangered, which were declining but not currently at risk and which were doing just fine at the moment. The Albatross and the Yellow Eyed Penguins are the endangered ones, and are hence the ones which everyone wants to see the most.

After this intro, the kids were split into two groups, as the observation room for the Albatross has a limited capacity. We were in the first group so proceeded to huff and puff our way up a fairly steep hill to the observation room. Miss2 made a valiant effort to walk all by herself, but at one point was making two steps forward and one back, so I carried her most of the way.

It was worth it.


Here is a parent and their chick - the only one of my Albatross photos to turn out okay. Three nesting sites are visible from the observation room, and we were fortunate enough to see two parents feeding chicks while we were there, and super-lucky to be in the right place at the right time to see one of them take off to fly out in search of more food. The parents share the feeding of their chick - often leaving it alone for a day or more while they go looking for food. The chicks are huge, but as a species they are not well adapted to deal with ground-dwelling predators like dogs - explaining why this site is the only mainland nesting site of Albatross in the world. All other nesting sites are on remote islands.

After returning to the education room, and spending some time looking at the information around the place
-about plastic pollution and how Albatross often mistake it for food - feeding it to their young and sometimes poisoning and starving them to death as a consequence,
- playing with a set of scales and a model real-weight chick to see how the rangers weigh them to check on their progress
- looking at a world map to show the different Albatross species and their distribution around the globe
- etc
we were joined by the other half of our group and took a walk down the hill to Pilots Beach. Again, Miss2 needed to be carried quite a lot of the way, which in my increasingly ungainly pregnant state was getting to be quite a mission. Thankfully one of the other Mums, whose kids are older, offered to carry her back up the hill! 2 year olds are a substantial weight (especially our two year olds), but the push chair would not have been suitable for the terrain so we were left with few options...

Still, again it was worth it!


This is a fur seal, sunning itself on the beach. If we were insane we could have gone right up to it and touched it. As with all wild animals, however, seals need a good deal of respect. They may look like awkward lumps while on the land - but they can still move fast, and they are heavy. They're not usually agressive - just playful - but humans generally don't like to play the games that adolescent male seals play with each other! So we gave this one a good 3 to 5 metres space and made sure not to get in the way of its escape route to sea. It responded by serenely ignoring more than 40 curious human intruders to its beach. Very civilised.

Human access is only allowed to about 1/2 the beach so that the seals and sea lions (which have only just started to visit again, after an absence of some years) have some space to lie about unmolested.

No sea lions were there that day - but I remember them from when I was a kid. Sea lions are huge. And not to be trifled with. (like the Dread Pirate Roberts...)

Along this same beach there are heaps of Little Blue Penguin burrows, which the penguins return to at dusk. We didn't see any penguins this trip, but I have seen them in the past, and they are very very cute. Again, though, it's important not to get in their way - not because they'll jump you, but because they'll just stay in the water and wait for you to go away, leaving their chicks going hungry in the burrows, while the parents get colder and tireder in the water.

After slogging it back up the hill to the Albatross Centre (with Miss2, thankfully, being perfectly content to be carried by this other, wonderful Mum), we met for a brief re-cap in the 'education room' and then sat and nattered over lunch. The nattering was good, as I got to meet some new people (or rather, I, being the new person, got to meet some of the old hands), and got to know better some I had only met once or twice.

Just to top off a wonderful day, I saw one of the Albatross flying around over the car-park when I went out to get our lunch from the car. Brilliant. In all the times I've been out to the colony over the years (but, admittedly have always been too cheap to pay the fee to see the nesting sites) I have never seen one flying. And that day I got to see it twice.

Magnificent.
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Photo catchup

It has been ages since we emptied our camera's memory card, with the result that mid-way through Miss5's last day at Kindy, we received the "Memory Full" notice and had to hurriedly scan back and delete some useless ones so we could be sure to catch the all important cake and candles shots.

We consequently have a large back-log of photos that we haven't shared with the world, so do join us on a trip through the last couple of months!


This is the rabbit hutch that I'm midway through converting into a little chicken coop for our two hens to spend their nights in. Yes, it's little, but it's much more spacious than the beer-crate they are currently using, and as you can see - two little human chickadees feel quite at home there.

And here's the view from the top. The kids are having their afternoon tea, having chosen a box instead of all the other, more comfortable and (to my mind) exciting places like the tree house.

Miss2's birthday party - the cake

Yay! She blew the candles out!

Miss2 feeding her baby. She initiated this game all by herself.

Oops! Dropped some of the food!

Miss5's last day at kindy. She made the hat all by herself and had a wonderful dayHere's a close-up of the cake. This was a wonderful gift. I mentioned on Facebook that I'd be buying Miss5's cake this year, and a friend offered, out of the blue, to bake and decorate one for us! Very much appreciated!!

And these final two photos are an eloquent example of Dad-physics. These batteries are the ones I took out of the smoke-detectors, so they've been running down their charge for a year, but even so, this is not a Mum-physics lesson. Merl decided it would be a good opportunity to teach the girls about touching batteries onto your tongue.

Yes indeed.

The second photo is taken in the split-second after Miss5 had done so.

However, the batteries must have been worn out enough for the zing to not be too bad, because Miss2 spent the next 2 or 3 days wandering around touching her tongue to the batteries just to get the kick out of it.

I've since done the responsible Mummy thing and explained to Miss5 that you must only ever do it with worn-out batteries, and I've hidden them away from Miss2. Merl insists the batteries will come in handy for electronics experiments, so I'll have to put them somewhere safe and label them as used batteries. Then we can throw them out in a year or so when we find them again and they've gone all melty and yuck...

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The Fresh Prince lied to me

It turns out that 90s sit-coms are not reliable sources of historical information. Who knew?

I clearly remember the moment, sitting at home after school watching the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air finding out something about African American identity that he didn't already know. He was suitably humbled and even granted his namby-pamby cousin a degree of respect for knowing something that he didn't.

You see, the Fresh Prince had thought that negro spiritual/gospel songs were simply ways of bouying themselves up, of giving themselves some hope for the future, and some way of taking their minds off the hell on earth in which many of them lived. But no! His cousin (whose name completely escapes me, so I'm going to have to google it...Carlton!) Carlton knew the true history, and then Will Smith and the entire audience did too...

You see, the story goes that many of the early negro spirituals were 'code songs', giving precise directions and instructions for escaped slaves to find their way along the Underground Railroad - of safe houses where people would give them shelter and help them escape to the north/Canada.

I have loved this story for years, and whenever I hear or sing one of those classics like 'Swing Low, Sweet Chariot', or 'Wade in the Water', I'd remember the secret purpose of those songs. I would thrill in the daring and terrifying escape plans, and the communication from field to field as a song got passed along. I never found out any more about it, but that little snippet was enough to fire my adolescent imagination.

The other day we had a CD of Sunday School music playing and there was one song which went

The animals went in one by one
There's one more river to cross
something something rhymes with one
There's one more river to cross

There's one wide river
And that's the river of Jordan
One wide river
There's one more river to cross

The animals went in two by two...

Which I thought was odd. The story of Noah's ark and the animals has nothing to do with the River Jordan. So I thought it must be one of those special songs. I thought that I would finally find out more about these secret code songs, for which I assumed there would be a whole pile of information. Which led me to the internet, of course. Which led to the shattering of a really good story.

Because, you see, there is absolutely no evidence that spirituals were used as precisely coded instructions for anything. All 'reputable' historians who have looked into it have sadly concluded it was a nice story but have placed it into the 'urban legend' category, with the first references to it arising in the mid-20th century. The other type of historian have continued to talk about it, but mysteriously fail to include any reference as to the source of their information.

Which makes me a bit sad.

But in the process, I have learned some more about the Underground Railroad, of which I was utterly ignorant (aside from knowing its name). I also found The National Geographic's Underground Railroad game, where you are a slave seeking to escape from a Maryland farm in 1850. Duly bookmarked for when the kids get old enough to not have nightmares about it.

I have also learned that 90s sit-coms starring teeny-bop rap artists are not reliable sources of information. Who'd a thunk it?


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Victoria Fires - a tribute

This month's fires in Victoria, Australia have been horrendous. These fires are the worst natural disaster in Australia's history. As of today the death toll stands at 181, but that has not been updated for days as forensics examiners struggle to identify what are human remains, let alone whose remains they might be.

New Zealand is very close to Australia - both geographically and culturally - and I weep at the news that is flowing from Victoria.

Here is a multimedia tribute, hosted by Stuff (NZ news) but originally from The Age (Australian news).

Our Darkest Day

I cannot begin to imagine the horror of wanting to escape, but having no idea where would be safe, where the fire is, where it's going next, or how to save my babies. So many families have got a single surviving parent who has lost their spouse and all their children - my worst nightmare.
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Using drawers as 'seedling flats'

This year I've been sprouting my own seeds and actually successfully coaxing them into seedlings and then into actual plants in the garden! This is very exciting and a big advance on my prior attempts to grow from seed - usually I'd forget about them and they'd either fail to sprout, or sprout and wither due to neglect.

Not this year

I've been roughly following the instructions given by John Jeavons in his How to Grow More... book. Instead of making my own seed sprouting mix, or using my own, rather poor, soil, I bit the bullet and bought potting mix from the garden centre.

Step one is to fill your seedling flat with soil and lay out your seeds, then water etc and generally look after them (sorry, this is not a step by step how to sprout seedlings - but there are lots of those on the internet :)

My cool innovation was to use discarded dresser drawers as my seed-sprouting containers. These are small enough for me to lift easily, and hold a sensible amount of seed for our small vege patch (while still allowing me to give excess away to friends). I drilled drainage holes in the bottom, but otherwise use them unmodified.

They are not painted in any way, or I'd be a bit cautious about lead paint.

The reason this has worked so much better than any other attempt I've made to grow from seed is that I've got them set up right outside my back door. So any time I exit the house I can see my little plants and give them a water and some TLC if they look like they need it. This is good. As a result we've already feasted off lettuce this year and this week I've got cabbage, turnip, kale, kohl-rabi and red cabbage to transplant into little re-used yoghurt pottles to get bigger and tougher before putting them in the garden.

So there you go. Works for me. All pretty exciting stuff :)

Sorry, it's too dark for photos just now but I'll take some tomorrow and update during the week.
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Science on the Brain

Science on the Brain is a site we've spent a bit of time at lately. Miss4 loves watching the videos, and although we've never actually gone ahead with any of his suggested further experiments, I've filed them away in my head for future reference.

Marshall Brain is also the creator of the How Stuff Works website, a father of four, and an enthusiast for how technology works and what science can mean in every day life. Science on the Brain is a collection of short videos (about 5 minutes) aimed at primary school kids, giving demonstrations of scientific principles and offering suggestions for further exploration.

Topics include measurement (your own height, lung capacity, jump height etc), insulation, why you need salt to make ice cream, what yeast eats, how far is a lightyear and a bunch of other stuff.

Highly recommended.
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