Backyard Wildlife Habitat

Go ahead and give us a sign for our yard. Wait, you might as well just give us a sign for indoors, too. Today was the day of the wild animals. It started this morning with something bounding across the kitchen. My first thought: "Oh no! The cat finally got the hamster!" But no. It was no hamster. It was a chipmunk, and it was heading upstairs. Eventually he got painted into a corner in the laundry room and found himself a hiding place and, hopefully, eventually a way out of our house. I don't really want to see him inside again. This was not typical for us--in fact, I've never had a live, furry wild animal in my house before.

Imagine my surprise when I was out just a hour or two later picking up the messy stuff that was in our backyard and I lifted the plastic climbing wall that had fallen on the ground and I found a leafy nest with a juvenile opossum in it! Ack! The kids were so very excited. So were the dogs. The poor opossum wasn't. He or she is probably 8-10 inches long, so most likely is a young juvenile living on his own, rather than an orphaned baby (who would be in a pouch with his mother unless she had died or he had been somehow separated from her). This was a healthy-looking, self-sufficient fellow. But he does need a new home. Walter wanted to build it a large cage with pieces of an old dog crate and a papasan chair frame. We had to have the discussion yet again that wild animals are not and will not be pets. It isn't legal to make them pets, it isn't safe to make them pets, and it isn't fair to them to make them pets. And this opossum is best suited to where he is, and he's likely to move along in a day or two at any rate.

We did some reading about opossums to refresh our knowledge. Back last year at Roots and Shoots the Area Rehabbers Klub, ARK, came and did a presentation for our group, complete with miniature baby opossums who had been orphaned. I remembered quite a bit about them from this, so unless something changes, I think our best course of action is to encourage this little guy to move along and make a nest somewhere else where he will be safe from US. The hardest part about knowing he is there now is that, well, we know he is there, and it is more temptation than Walter can handle not to be checking in on it. I'm hoping that nightfall and the memory of the big human dangers today will encourage the baby to find a new place to nap in the daytime. Meanwhile, we need to make the yard a little less hospitable for our own safety.

We had nothing on our schedule today, so we stayed at home for all but about 20 minutes, when we went out for ice cream and an iced latte and to put Rut to bed. Walter's best friend in the neighborhood, Jared, is going away this weekend and will be gone for the entire summer, and it is not clear whether he will be returning when summer is over. Walter doesn't know this yet, and I already ache for the pain I know he will feel when the reality of this hits him. Walter can have a hard time relating to other kids, and Jared was an extraordinary find for him; they are inseparable. Right now he is with Jared from about 3:30 every day until we finally force him to come in at 8:00. And things are so easy when Jared is around because the two of them go off and build things with Legos or make forts in the woods. It will be hard to fill Jared's shoes, even if only for the short term.

Today Times Tales came in the mail. I opened it and read the instruction book right away, and the boys and I read the book (7 times!) and then went through the various steps to memorize and be able to retell the goofy stories about Mrs. Snowman, Mrs. Week, the First Grade Class, and the Treehouse. But darnit, Ollie knows those upper multiplication facts now. I think what "works" about the program isn't the mnemonic devices to help them recall the products, but the motivation to prove they can answer these questions so that they never have to hear about how many Christmas lights the First Grade Class put on the Treehouse ever again! Walter, not surprisingly, has trouble remembering the stories themselves and gets the numbers in them all mixed u. I anticipate much more need for reinforcement with him. It's sort of an ingenious program, though. I wonder if we keep doing this if when they are my age they will still have a part of their mind that has that glimmer of nostalgia whenever they encounter 8x7-56 and there's a fleeting memory of Mrs. Snowman and Mrs. Week getting a speeding ticket.

I am still proceeding with a fairly full school agenda for much of the summer. We're adapting as well as we can to Saxon math, which is stressing us all out because the boys can't seem to figure out what it is looking for. Walter, especially,will blurt out the answer (a correct one), but often that's not even the major point for Saxon. It wants them to show their work, and Walter has done the problem some way other than what they have in mind. But I'll stick with it in the name of better standardized test scores. We'll do better this coming year, I'm sure.

I am just exhausted. Poor sleeping for the past two nights, lots of interruptions, lots of coughing children. I wonder what tomorrow will bring?!