What We Did... (October 2014)

October was a pretty fun and adventurous month for us.  The weather was nice a lot, so we took walks nearly every day.  Olivia turned five years old at the end of the month. Some school workbooks were finished by the kids this month, all around the same time.  As always, I took the kids' fall pictures, but the group pictures didn't turn out as well as I'd like, because the boys didn't want to cooperate, though William apologized afterward.  I'd bought a hat for William to wear, since his hair was in a bad transitional state of growth, but he decided not to wear it, either.  However, I'm very pleased with the backdrop this time around.  Hey, I've got to look on the bright side of everything.  ;-)

Here are some pictures from the month:

Fall Pictures

You can tell the boys are just thrilled to be getting their pictures taken.  LOL  This ended up being the best group picture.  Even Atlas (the dog) stars in it!

Hahahahaha!

This baby decided to be a complete clown for her solo pictures.

Love this baby!!!

Part northern boundary of our first pasture, taken from the road we walked down after finishing picture-taking.  Then when we got down to the main road, I spotted the following caterpillar, often nicknamed "wooly bear" by many.

Pyrrharctia isabella (Isabella tiger moth larva)

Another Garden Tub Visitor

Recall from the September section of my post on last summer, we'd discovered a scorpion in our garden tub.  Just days later, right at the start of October, we discovered a mouse!  Nathan gave it a strawberry, and William put it in the aquarium we'd used for Tad.  We didn't keep it, though.

Mus musculus (house mouse)

A Trip to the Park

My wonderful husband took the kids to the park for some fun while I enjoyed some time alone.  He took these pictures of Elizabeth when he pushed her in the swing.

Window Art

I took out our window crayons for one morning for the three youngest kids to use on our master bedroom windows.  Trusten chose to draw some of his funny irregular shapes, which were neat, but they were light blue and didn't show up well when I took a picture.    Liv made a gigantic smiley face, but by the time Elizabeth finished up, there were just wild scribbles of vibrant colors.

Food

Spicy Thai noodles; white beans with cornbread, fried zucchini, and fresh spinach; and vegetable stew with cornbread

Walking to the Creek

I love these pictures!!!

Inquisitively thinking, considering...  ;-)  And yes, she decided she needed to know!  She soaked her socks, shoes, and the bottoms of her pants.  But she was quite satisfied with no regrets.

After I changed Elizabeth, we went out to watch Nathan and William for a few minutes, load wood from the trailer to the deck.

Milesia virginiensis (yellow jacket hoverfly; news bee; Virginia flower fly)

Milesia virginensis larvae feed on rotting wood, so it was no surprise that this adult appeared here on the deck near the wood Nathan and William had just brought from the woods.  The forest is the most likely place you'll find this large syrphid fly.  If you've read this blog for years, you might remember the small syrphid fly (hover fly) that caught Trusten's attention several years ago.  The Youtube video is here.  Though both specimens are in the family Syrphidae, this large hover fly is in a different genus.  There are many varieties.  Hover flies, as you can see, use mimicry to help keep predators away.  I remember one of the kids, upon seeing it, even though it was a yellow jacket of some sort, but I was quick to relieve the concern.


Mushroom Collage

These were the October mushroom specimens of which I caught on camera.  If I hadn't been closely looking, I would have missed the puffball, as it in a pasture on the other side of a fence and partially hidden by leaves.  I took the best picture I could without going out of my way to get to a place to cross.  Don't miss my "early fall through early winter" post on mushrooms and fungi.


Fun in the Leaves

I got some sweet pictures and videos of the girls playing in leaf piles.  :-)  Trusten had some fun, too.


Persimmons

Diospyros virginiana (American persimmon)

On a walk, William noticed a persimmon tree that was loaded with fruit.  He was able to reach a few and picked them.  This is the second specimen in this post that was named partly after the state of Virginia.


Sycamore Tussock Caterpillars

Halysidota harrisii (sycamore tussock moth larvae)

I've posted about sycamore tussock moths before, but I wanted to share here the varying colors.  They can be yellow, or they can be white, both with the lovely orange.  When you see my finger there, it is not to pick it up.  These can cause urticaria, Olivia learned firsthand last year.


Olivia's Fifth Birthday

Yay!  Livi turned five.  Sadly, just days before her birthday (and the day she opened her presents early), she raced her brothers down the gravel road and hit a still-in-outer-hull walnut with her foot and went down in a terrible way, receiving some road rash.  One wound was a bit deep, just about a candidate for a stitch or two.  She healed quite nicely, though, but she was left with a small scar.  Boy, that girl can run, though!  Her daddy carried her the rest of the way home that day, bless her heart.

Homemade whole-wheat strawberry cake with homemade strawberry icing

Miscellaneous

Trusten finished the last books of Explode the Code.  He hated the last two books, but he did well, anyway.

Sweet-E with her baby, and then again on another day when she decided to help me put some laundry in the dryer.  Oops!  The baby got held by the head there. 

Elizabeth loves playing with water.  She will fill a cup and pour.  Fill and pour.  Dump.  Fill and pour.  Dump.

These are a comments on a couple of assignments for my college psychology course by the end of October.

It was a fun and learning-filled month! 

Until next time...

Mushrooms {Early Fall through Early Winter}

I've had so much fun taking pictures of and identifying new mushrooms over the last few months.  This will make the second installment of mushroom identification.  I've still got to make pages in our plant (and fungi, now) identification binder to make the kids' memorization of them and important facts easier.  

We also read a great book about fungi, a cute story about a mushroom, and are about to read our new book on the life cycle of mushrooms.  

And now for the mushrooms I photographed, with the ones I identified labeled...

These were on some logs on our deck for burning in our wood stove.

Yep!  Our grocery store sells shiitakes straight from the log.

The following ones I've not yet identified with any certainty.  There are some that I think I know what they are, but I'm not positive, yet.

I think the above may be an orange mycena.

Almost certainly Jack-o-Lantern's above and below (Omphalotus illudens)

No mushrooms, but I loved the mixes of mosses and lichens.

I'm thinking common split gills, but...

These are smooth underneath, unlike Trametes versicolor (turkey tails), so I believe these are false turkey tails (Stereum ostrea.

These are clearly some sort of bracket/shelf mushrooms, but they were very, very distant, away and up a tree, and from where I could take a picture, this is the best I could get.

See the red spots?  They were beautiful.  Looks like a dried up version of the raspberry slime mold I featured in my last mushroom and fungi identification post.  I don't think that's it, though.  The log where the slime mold and other fungi were growing back in the summer is free and clear of any growth right now.  There is no trace of any of it, so there's no logical reason for me to believe this can be Tubifera ferruginosa.

Hope you enjoyed!  I'm currently working on putting together posts covering what we did in October through December.  December and half of January were pretty hectic months.  There was a lot of stress, but now things are going really well, and so I hope to catch up on blogging soon. :-)

Until next time...