The Christmas season is important in our household. Having 3 young children, and lots of family in the area, typically means lots of events and lots of fun. One of my favorite things about the holidays, is getting to share traditions from my childhood with my kids. It's so much fun getting to relive some of that childhood magic. I also love finding new traditions to try out and incorporate into our holiday season. Here are a few of my family's favorite traditions: Decorating the Tree Growing up my family always set up and decorated our tree the day after Thanksgiving. It was, and still is, one of my favorite parts of the holiday season. I love waking up before the kids and sitting in the quiet, with a cup of coffee by the tree. There's something almost therapeutic about sitting next to a lit Christmas tree on a quiet morning or evening. Most years we use a fake tree, so we stick to family tradition and set it up and decorate on the Friday after Thanksgiving. It...

All birds have beaks. They are used for finding and accessing food, self defense, and building nests. Beaks are actually an extension of a bird's skull and are covered in a protein sheath called keratin, the same protein that gives our fingernails strength.  Birds eat a wide variety of foods. Some birds eat fruit and nuts, and some eat seeds. There are birds that eat insects, and birds that eat small mammals and reptiles. Many sea birds and water fowl eat fish. There are even birds that eat flower nectar. Tearing apart fruit requires a very different beak than extracting nectar from a flower does, so many birds have developed highly specialized beaks, specific to their diet.  Common types of beaks: Meat Eater-  Birds of prey, like eagles and hawks, have sharp powerful hooked beaks for tearing meat. Fruit and Nut Eater - Birds that eat a lot of fruit and nuts, like macaws, have strong beaks with a sharp hook at the tip for tearing fruit and cracking sh...

Autumn is such a great time of year for nature inspired crafts and learning. The world is full of so many gorgeous colors and the weather is perfect for getting outside and exploring. Here are a few of our favorite autumn themed crafts and learning activities: Autumn Leaf Math Count and Sort Leaves Take a nature walk around your neighborhood or yard and collect some autumn leaves. Then have your child sort and count them. Try sorting them in different ways like by color, by leaf type, by size, etc... Make a Graph Collect some different types of autumn leaves and then sort them either by species or color. Make a graph showing the amounts of different types of leaves that you collected.  Leaf Symmetry Activity Find a large leaf and carefully cut it in half, down one side of the center vein. Set one half onto a piece of paper and challenge your child to draw the missing half.  Autumn Leaf Science Autumn Leaf Color Extraction Activity   I love this one because the resul...

My 3 year old decided she wanted to be an autumn nature fairy for Halloween this year, so I set out to make her a pair of autumn themed fairy wings. We had recently used contact paper and some pressed autumn leaves to make placemats with neat autumn leaf art, so I thought I could try using a similar method to make some wings. After a little bit of trial and error, we came up with a method that worked and the wings came out gorgeous! Instructions: To make your own set of autumn fairy wings, you will need: - an old pair of costume wings (Dollar Tree wings work great) -clear contact paper -pressed dried leaves  -scissors -clear tape -gold glitter (optional) Before you can get started making your wings, you will need some autumn leaves. You can buy artificial leaves or collect your own outside and press and dry them inside a heavy book or with a flower press. It typically takes a couple days for the leaves to completely dry. We noticed leaves with really deep color...

A year ago today our lives were changed forever when the Camp Fire, the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history, swept through and destroyed most of our little foothill community. If you haven't read my family's Camp Fire story already , you can read it here . Even a full year later, it still feels so surreal to me, like a bad dream I might eventually wake up from. While the rest of the world has moved on and shifted their focus onto other topics and other disasters, we living here, in and around the burn scar, are all still dealing with the aftermath of such enormous devastation.  Living through an event like this, seeing everyone you know loose everything, knowing how close you and everyone you know came to not escaping that day, changes you. It's a year later and I still wake up in the middle of the night, panicked, wondering where I am some nights. The tiniest bit of smoke in the air gets me throwing our belongings into bags, just incase ...

An activity we frequently do on our nature walks and family hikes is practicing identifying plants we come across. Sometimes we purposefully set out to forage for a favorite snack or medical herb, and sometimes we just practice identifying random plants and trees, either way it's always a fun way to learn about the natural world around us. Why You Should Teach Your Kids To ID Plants: One of the reasons I teach my kids how to identify local plant life is so that they know what plants are edible, which have medicinal properties, and which plants to stay away from. My kids love foraging for blackberries, grapes, and other wild growing fruit. We also regularly forage for wild herbs like plantain, dandelion, yarrow, and elderberries to use in medicinal salves and tinctures. It's important for them to know that they are picking the right plants and not something harmful or poisonous. Plant identification is also a great way for kids to connect with nature and learn about pl...