KampKrug

We picked up a caterpillar on our run and Sam grabbed a lizard companion from our backyard! So excited to have a caterpillar in residence again!

We’ve been scouring the milkweed trees nearby to find a monarch caterpillar but hadn’t seen any yet! We couldn’t figure it out because by this time last year we’d already “hatched” quite a flock of butterflies. The magic of watching metamorphosis never fades. Sam is quite a lizard-catcher and he showed us his stuff this morning in our backyard as I tried to figure out how to avoid going to the commissary for yet another day…but I was out of coffee creamer so we really had to go. It is such fun to play with the boys and enjoy them admiring these little creatures. I’m reading “Last Child in the Woods” by Richard Louv, in which he discusses the modern child’s “nature-deficit disorder.” One of the chapters mentioned Gardner’s eight categories of intelligence (bodily-kinesthetic, musical, visual-spatial, logical-mathematic, interpersonal, verbal-linguistic, intrapersonal, and naturalistic), a perspective which underscores something I appreciate intuitively – the importance of time outdoors, and the special ways intelligence is expressed by children, and adults (i.e. not limited to the IQ scale). Maybe if I view them through this lens, I won’t be antsy next time Sam stops to examine a millipede right in the middle of our descent down the Koko Crater steps