Antheraea polyphemus

 We discovered this moth on our way in from the park today. It's really impressive, about 5 1/2 inches across. The girl wanted to pet it, but we decided that it would probably prefer to be left alone. I thought the daytime photo was washing out some of the details, so I just ran out and took the second pic. The Antheraea polyphemus doesn't eat after becoming a moth, and doesn't even have a mouth. Apparently she's going to be hanging out on our porch until a lucky male finds her there, then they'll mate.  

The caterpillar is pretty cute, and reminds me of a certain Very Hungry one that's pretty popular around here.

Today's tiny harvest

 Green beans, beats, a potato. It won't go far, but it will be tasty!
The potatoes don't seem to be doing very well. Probably due to the giant hornworms that tried to take them out. We'll have to try again next year with row covers.

I think we'll put in another round of beets in a few weeks for a second harvest before winter. There are still a bunch out there, and now that they have been thinned I hope they'll be doing some good growing.

H&J love to help harvest and clean our veggies. They do a really good job, too.

Oh, this old thing?

 The kids were excited to find a freshly shed snake skin on a bush yesterday. J wanted to hold it, and feel the texture, H was more interested in looking at it without touching. They were both very intrigued by the area where the eyes had been. The top of the jaw was a bit curled, but luckily it was fresh enough that we could uncurl it and see the whole head.

Writing

Lots of writing practice happening around here. This is from last week. H's folder is blue, J's is red. The kids were asking for help writing, so we worked on some pre-writing shapes. After we did this together, they continued on their own for a while. It's interesting to see how differently their papers are organized. H's is very orderly and purposeful, while J's is more chaotic.

Surprise!

J wanted to make sure that everyone who looked at her drawing knew that the egg was where Surprise came from. She asked me how to spell Surprise, and did a pretty good job writing it.