Taking delight in creepy crawling creatures
I encourage you to take your children outdoors to explore what is around them. Going on a nature walk with Joshua usually means I must take the insect book with. He is fascinated with creepy crawling creatures and will spend as much time as I allow staring at the insect and asking questions about its habitat, food preferences, predators, colouring, defence mechanisms and asking what sound it makes!
It is quite humbling. I’m the parent, right? So I have all the answers, right? Wrong, oh so very wrong! The more we live in this wonderful outdoor world of arthropods, the more I have to learn because I know so little.
So it’s back to searching for them on the ground and researching them back home! It makes for wonderful hone-schooling projects too, we count the legs and appendages and classify them, then together (child and adult) we learn all about our subject!
Are we as adults too tall to bend down and look at the little things in life? Is that why we miss them? My dear friends, there is a reason for us to take time to smell the roses – when we bend down, we may see the ladybird eating the aphid on the stalk of the rose and the camouflaged spider on its petal and the butterfly on the rose next to it.
What a wonderful world we live in. Take delight in the creepy crawling creatures – you will learn a thing or too from them!
