Sunflowers, swim tales

KB & KG both love nature.  KB at the going rate might grow up to be an organic farmer living in rural Montana walking bare feet may be!  He wanted me to give seed packets as return gifts for his birthday.  He read up information about quinoa on the ipad and while doing so told me about this plant called Kinnikinnick.  That's how crazy he is about planting seeds, watching flowers bloom or looking at the instructions for planting on different seed packets.  And what brother loves, sister does.  So KG too is into all this stuff.  Sadly for them, I don't let them plant too much new stuff because we might be moving houses and I don't want to again go through tending to plants and then having to leave them behind during the move.  Even if it is a local move, it is a hassle really to take these along.  And most of these anyway we plant in the ground, not in pots.  However, I let KB and KG pick one set of flowering plants and we bought seeds and planted them.

KB planted mammoth sunflowers and KG snapdragons.  Her snapdragons for some reason are stunted and are not really growing much.  KB's mammoth sunflowers on the other hand grew taller than him and they gave us bright and beautiful sunflowers for the last two month.  Despite planting some stakes next to their stems for support, they began sagging under their own weight and are now touching the ground.  KB is so matter of fact about it.  "Mamma, that is the natural cycle.  The flowers will wilt and the stems will sag and the seeds will fall to the ground and in the next cycle new plants will grow!  That's just how nature works" he tells me.  Since he gets excited about learning fun stuff in math, his father took a nice close up shot of the sunflower heads to teach him about Fibonacci sequences found in nature.  KB's eyes lit up when he counted those himself and discovered the pattern!  It is pure joy, those moments when their eyes light up when they figure out something new and understand it.  I will leave you with a couple of pictures of his sunflowers.

Quick update about the swim team that I had talked about in my previous post.  KB went to two more (one hour each) sessions of the swim team.  Before he went to the second class, I got him the fins, the kickboard etc and also told his teacher to teach him how to use those when they went for the swim lesson.  This time around he was a little more prepared.  He did not enjoy it but he got through the full one hour.  The third time around, he was not happy when I was driving them to the pool.  But he still went ahead with it and actually enjoyed himself and felt happy when he finished the full hour!