Palo Alto Tender Tracks Tuesday Oct. 16, 2012

Wunderlich Park
Waxing Crescent Moon
Day 13

Aoife came back after a grand trip to yosemitte with many family and friends. Yeah!   Paul came from a home that has a brand new baby brother! and Kaden was a little tentative about the day so Mom stayed for half of circle time.
Emme sat upon the stump for circle and was seen by Jill singing with us. She then wandered off to pick flower petals when Jill went over to invite her in. She came and at that point we were all lining up to use the apple pealer to peel our apples for snack.  They really liked eating the “apple noodles”, the skin that gets peeled off like a noodle.   We then had a wonderful story about How Squirrels find their Nuts and build their houses and then off we went to play.  They again stayed quite present for circle and it was actually very quiet!
The day was getting hot so I wanted them to go into the cool woods for the day.  Paul has been to Wunderlich but he did not remember how we get to where we usually go.  He did remember the horses and noticed that, they weren’t there!!!!
We did a lot of tracking of the horses, finding the shape of their shoes and how the shoe can tell us what direction they are going. We found a lot of their scat/poop and really inspected it. Was it fresh? How can you tell?  How long has it been here?  Where is the Sun in the sky and when do you think the poop got so dried out?  and on and on the inquisitive question went on being asked in order to push their curiosities.  Then, it was time, along the trail, to find when the trail turns into a refrigerator!  Meaning, when do we go into the woods and can you feel the cool air on your skin?  Well, indeed the temperature truly dropped and it is always exciting to feel the moment it does this along the trail!  Not far from there is where we set up camp and made our  selves comfortable for the rest of the day.
When we got there I showed them the wonderful Redwood Tree house that they all loved and played in on and off throughout the day. Paul, Aoife and Jill made the most of it later on in the day as the three of them stayed there while the rest of us were down in the dry creek bed.  I heard that their “house” got burned up and they were using their screw drivers to make everything better.  Jill said that Aoife and Paul played so sweetly together and Aoife talked on and on.
Kaden and Paul were really into Spider man/Kaden and Iron Man/Paul.   I used my own Nature Transformers to take these characters and bring them alive with the beings that live all around us.  That means that Kaden wound up making lot’s of webs and hearing about how Spiders wound up eating Flies and Paul learned all about having a hard outside shell like a snail is a way to protect yourself. So Iron Man and Snail are really quite similar, so very soft inside with a hard outside.  And when their shell is off, they need so much love just like everybody else.
The rest of us were Bears alot and we painted our face with found charcoal from the Redwood stumps. Miu DID NOT want to get dirty at all yet finally, near days end she did sit down on her bottom on the ground to go down a hill that the rest of us were on.
Giselle struggled with climbing yet Jill helped her all the way down this hill and she stayed with the rest of us as we built Cakes from rocks and made cupcakes from Eucalyptus caps.
There was lot’s of balancing and climbing on big logs and being baby cubs.  Kaden brought me LOT’S of fish and Evan helped with just being a baby.  He started a game where I threw them a stick and they went to  fetch them.  Aoife, Paul, Evan and Alice had a lot! of fun with this game.  I kept throwing those sticks and they LOVED running after them and bringing them back. Miu finally came over with a VERY large stick that I tossed only she did not bring it back in her mouth!!!!
There is a wonderful Bay tree for climbing there and that is what the children did a lot. At first it was Kaden’s spider web house but then almost all the childrne came over and climbed on it.  He climbed down when that happened and just looked at his home, invaded!
Emme, Alice and sometimes Miu got into little snits with each other and it was fun to diffuse that with such little things like, “don’t smile now (when they were getting mad at each other). It took only saying that once and they were off laughing and laughing.
Emme complained that Alice had hit her? taken something from her?  I said that I noticed both of them having a hard time one with the other and she just burst into a smile.  It would have taken a lot to say something different than what I saw and she knew it so she let go and laughed!  All was really well.
Going home Jill started some great songs with them that they all liked and they shared,in  round robin style, their parts to the songs.