Ed

Anyone from the northwest is familiar with Ed Hume. he's the garden guru around here (and he's less annoying than Ciscoe Morris)He's pretty cool, and he's a local guy. Local as in living in my town...next door to one of Maya's classmates.

Maya's class went to his Children's Garden last year, and her 1/2 class went this year as well to release some painted lady butterflies that they have grown and cared for for the past several weeks.

Maya cried the night before the release because she was going to miss her butterflies (she had two--Mariposa and Claire). The teachers were all glad to finally have them out of the classroom. 40-some odd butterflies are pretty high maintenance. Well, by the time of the release, there were fewer due to unexpected demises. One kid even said (they weren't told when there were butterflies that died), it seems like there aren't as many as we used to have. I had to suppress a chuckle.



Maya with the butterflies.



Ed Hume.



Maya watches the first butterfly finally fly away.
It took awhile because they have to warm up their wings before taking flight, and though it was 70 or so degrees and sunny the day before, this particular day was overcast and cool-- not good conditions for wing warming.



Painted Lady Butterfly.



This is a dragon made from bowling balls that children have decorated. It's really cool.
And one last photo of Ed (he's holding leaves from a Venus flytrap).



Our kids took a field trip to PLU last week, and they have one more field trip to Red Robin in two weeks, and that will be the end of our field trips for the year. I swear we had about 15 field trips this year. Yet one more reason why I love the co-op.