sam sam the newt man

Yesterday we walked to our local country park to attend an event put on by the park rangers. It was essentially a bug hunting and pond dipping morning and Sam was in his element. Following the visit by the cricket he has gone into an insect/wildlife phase and spent all tuesday afternoon with his head in the nature books. As a result on wednesday he was overflowing with info which he passed on to all and sundry like it or not! I was amazed and what he knew, things I certainly had not read to him. He knew all about great diving beetles, caddis fly larvae and the like. I was a bit disapointed that the rangers weren't able to answer all his questions, especially about the names of some of the critters we found. He got fobbed off with-'oh it only has a latin name which I can't pronounce" or "there are so many species of moths/beetles that not all of them have names". Sam was not to impressed with these answers and neither was I. Why are the latin names so hard to pronounce, they aren't if you try and at events like this they should be aiming to give the children as much accurate info as possible. The highlight of the morning for sam was without doubt catching a young newt. At first he was very concerned incase it was a great crested newt as he knows they are protected and you aren't allowed to catch them. Once he was assured that it wasn't he spent ages watching it in the temporary tank. He had a ball and has plans to take M pond dipping at the weekend. As long as they don't bring home what they find I don't mind!

Today S had his second swimming lesson and he really seemed to enjoy it. I think it makes a big difference that the teacher gets in the pool with him. Now we have the car back we can start going to the pool on our own again. We could both use the exercise.

Picked the car up today-yipee!! We have managed really well without it but it will be nice to have it back. Just the freedom of being able to go where we want when we want will be nice. To be fair the bus and train service round here isn't bad and now we have the hang of it we will probably use it more.

Off to the library tomorrow as well as running a few errands and hitting the pool in the afternoon.