A Black Widow in the Wrong Place

When I was around 6 years old, my brothers and I were playing outside.  My mom was sitting on our deck reading in the sun.  Beside our house is a rain ditch.  The water runs into a pipe that brings it out in the lower driveway and it pours out onto the driveway to go about its own business.

We had decided to see that, if we got a bucket of water and poured it down the drain, the person in the lower driveway could block the drain up and keep the water from flowing.  It was working splendidly until we got to our second or third round.  It was Brother's turn and he was clogging up the drain with pine cones and such.  Big Brother was about to go up to join me when he glanced back and saw… can you guess?  There was a black widow on Brother's back.  When Big Brother saw this he immediately told Brother about it.  Brother didn't believe him so Big Brother shouted, “Mom!  There’s a black widow on Brother's back!!!”  Mother rushed down the path with lightening speed and flicked the black widow off of Brother's back with her bare hands.  Then, with her slippers on, she stomped the life out of that poor spider!

Now she regrets killing it a bit but there wasn’t much of a choice at the moment!  And after that, I had a wonderful story to tell all my friends about Mother and how she had killed a black widow with her “bare hands.”  I always put emphasis on the “hands” part.  I was proud of my terrified mother who had been absolutely shocked to learn that a spider that could kill her child in a matter of days or hours had been on his back!  But, Brother is very alive to this day!

Living in the Mountains

For me, if I lived in the city, I’d die within three days.  I really really really really love the mountains!  Even if living in the mountains means that my Mom has a wild tarantula on her finger or I have a scorpion on my bed or in the sink* I’d rather live in the mountains.  Why?  I was born in the city, I admit, but I have lived almost my whole life in the mountains.  The only time that I haven’t lived in the mountains, I was in the small city that’s next to our town.

This is my opinion of the mountains: I love the mountains because they’re beautiful and fresh.  I wake up almost every morning early and listen to the sound of millions (maybe a little less) of birds.  I see a deer with her fawn and a little later another mother with her fawns.  I hear a scrub-jay squawking loudly outside, and I read my book.  Our neighbor down the road has chickens and the roosters start crowing at around 4:45 a.m. and don’t stop until around 9:30 p.m.

I suppose that some people like cities, but I can’t see why.  Some are just... born liking cities.  The majority in the U.S. live in cities but I am not part of the majority.  Cities can be fun in their own way though.  You can go shopping and get great stuff and you can go to cool places.  Most museums are in cities.  I pretty much think that cities are a nice place to visit… but I wouldn’t like to live there.  But I love the mountains. :-)

*This actually happened.  So, if your squeamish, I wouldn’t suggest living like me:

This is the young tarantula that Mom had on her finger.

A moth decided that our house was a good place for eggs.

And they hatch! :)

A June Bug at our front door.

Deer in our backyard.  Now, we've got two families - one has a
single baby and one has a couple siblings.

Homeschooling

I think that homeschoolers have a better education and time throughout life.    The curriculum that I have is called SOS (Switched On Schoolhouse).  It’s a program that you can bring with you on a laptop.  The downside is that sometimes the lesson doesn’t explain itself very well and I have to ask help from one of my parents.

I love homeschooling because I don’t have to get up early at all!  I can sleep in until as late as 10 o’clock when I had a previous long day.  But my mom is always trying to get us up earlier.  She recently came up with several schedules, one for each child.  She isn’t very strict with the getting up times but I have to get up at around 8:30 – which is really early for me.

But the thing with homeschooling is that you can get behind in your homework.  It just keeps piling up and piling up and you can’t keep up with it!  Sometimes, when I get too far behind in homework, I get depressed.  The farthest that I’ve ever been behind is 70 lessons.  But it was under control then because I was focusing on language arts and nothing else.  Right now, I’m about 35 lessons behind.  I’ll be able to catch up but it’ll be a while.

Also, you can go on vacations when it’s still school time.  When I was about six, I went to Legoland.  It was sometime in the fall and the lines were really short (there were almost no lines in some places).  I went four times on a ride that I really liked without any waiting.  We got in small Legoish cars and you could drive around a little city-street with stop signs and stop lights galore!

This is one of the best rides at Lego Land!!! :D

I think that homeschooling is one of the best experiences.

The Birds That Hum

Hummingbirds!  Hummingbirds are amazing birds.  They are the only birds that fly backwards.  This comes in handy when they fight over the bird feeder.  They can fly up, down, backwards, forwards, left, right, and they can hover without a second thought.

They’re called humming birds for obvious reasons but if anyone who’s reading this blog hasn’t seen a hummingbird then I’ll explain.  They beat their wings about 70 times a second which leads to 4,200 times a minute.  This makes a soft whirring noise and their wings ‘hum’!  But hummingbirds vary in size so the bigger the hummer, the less they beat.

Of course, all this beating of the wings takes energy, so you can imagine how much these small birds need to eat.  They can eat up to eight times their body weight in one day.  They also must eat every 5 minutes or they’ll starve to death.  This means that bird feeders are much enjoyed.  But if you do put up a hummingbird feeder don’t dye the sugar water red!  It’s really bad for the little hummers and anyway, the feeder should have colorful flowers as the places where the ‘nectar’ comes out, so red water won’t attract them any more than clear.

And expect a lot of fighting among the hummingbirds because that’s just the way they are.  The smaller the animal, the more aggressive they get.  This works with dogs and horses as well.  Don’t worry that the hummingbirds will hurt each other, because the only weapon they have is their aggressiveness… and sometimes they get close enough together so that their wings beat together, but that’s nothing.  It only sounds bad. 

There are 356 types of hummingbirds found.  And the hummers are only found in North and South America, so I always try not to become used to their awesomeness.  I have a bird feeder outside of my house and the little hummers are almost always coming and going.  My brother says that they remind him of me – in the aggressiveness he means.