Observer

Sometimes, Petra stuns me with the things she notices or understands about nature. Just a few examples from the last few days:

Silas (singing): All we want to do is eat your brains! We’re not unreasonable, I mean no one’s gonna eat your eyes.

Petra: My eyes wouldn’t be any use without my brain, because I need my brain to understand what my eyes are seeing.

Petra tosses a rock in the river.

Did you notice how when you throw in one rock, it has its own ripple circles, but it splashes up water droplets and then they fall down and each have their own ripple circles? I wonder if those ones make tiny water droplets and tiny ripple circles that we can’t see.

I think it’s weird that you can cross your eyes, but you can’t cross your nostrils.

We have three different kinds of frogs in our little pond.

Maple (last remaining kitten) is really wild since his brothers left. He bit my nose this morning! Kittens always get weird when they’re the last one left.

Report from the front in the on-going battle against the ants.

Me: If you would be more careful about not leaving bits of food around, the ants might give up and leave. They think you’re their friend because you feed them.

Petra: I noticed they were avoiding my clementine peels so if you stop cleaning those up, maybe they will go away.

Petra has discovered that if she drops balls of wet clay into the river, it dispurses in interesting, firework-like patterns, which she calls “water works.”

I wonder if I could put chemicals in my water works that would light up in the water. Are there chemicals like that?