Photo-A-Day #1795

Eva loves Sid the Science Kid and so whenever I have a chance to work a little Science! into our fun times together I try and do it. This afternoon when I got home from work I took Eva out to play on her Tricycle. We stepped down from the bike because she wasn’t getting the whole pedaling thing. So instead I took out the tricycle that our neighbors at the Cape gave us at the end of the summer. This is smaller, easier for her to get off and on and the pedals are a bit closer. There is also a handle on the back so that I can push when I need to. We were playing in the driveway for a while and she was doing pretty well. She was even starting to pedal a bit. But eventually she got tired of that and we walked around the front yard.

While we walked around Eva picked up a few sticks and pretended that they were umbrellas and that she was Mary Poppins. She hasn’t seen that in weeks, lately it has all been about Ariel and the Little Mermaid. I’ve been reading to her from the Princess Treasury and she does extremely well listening to me as I rad the stories. These are chapter books with minimal photos so I’m really impressed that she makes it through 3 full chapters a night. Anyway, she was walking through the house today singing the Sister Suffragettes song and then stopped and yelled “POSTS EVERYONE!” and went along with her day. Allison told me about that via chat. I can just picture her doing that too.

Back to the front lawn. We were playing and I noticed that the Wisteria plant was dropping its seed pods. What I didn’t know until today was that those seed pods dry up and pop open either on the vine or when they hit the ground. They really pop when they hit the ground. This was something I never noticed before. So I picked a bunch off the vine and showed Eva the pods and then I popped a few open with my hands. We examined the outside of the pop and the inside as well. Eva was more concerned about the insides and she gathered up the seeds as I threw the pods on the sidewalk and watched them explode like a kid with bang snaps at a 4th of July parade. We gathered up a bunch of the seeds and will be putting a few in plastic baggies with a paper towel (just sad that I don’t have any of the industrial brown sandpaper-like paper towels of my youth) and taping them to the window to see if they will sprout.

We reinforced the science lesson by playing on PBSKids.org and watching a Sid the Science Kid episode for parents that talked about planting seeds.

Eva was hot and cold about the whole thing but I think that once we start seeing the seeds sprout and also looking at them with a magnifying glass she’ll become more excited. She loves her magnifying glass.

We were sitting there on the front steps as I tried to take photo after photo of Eva with the sun setting in the background. She moves a lot. She stopped and said to me, “My heart is full of love for you.” God, I love this kid. I told her right back that my heart is also full of love for her. Then she said, “let’s look at the houses.” She cracks me up.