A small brown haired head with flecks of blond leans down. My son’s nose is almost touching a bright orange flower, its torn pedals sprouting from a huge green stem. In the middle of the flower, there’s a fuzzy yellow and black bumblebee butt sticking out. It has its whole face immersed in the flower, guzzling down nectar. My son watches it in wonder, occasionally speaking to it.
“Hi!” my older son chirps to people walking by on the sidewalk as he pedals by on his bike. A few minutes later, he yells to me about the injustice of how short the green is on this traffic light – we’re stopped at a red light *again* – and how we have to wait for it. Honestly, of all the things he could get angry about, it’s pretty harmless. Throughout the ride, my younger son chatters away sitting behind me, telling me all the observations he held in during class.
“Look, there’s a bat!” I exclaim, my finger moving as a dark silhouette flits across the sky. My younger son and I are sitting on the back steps of our deck, looking up into the darkening night sky.
“There’s another one!” he points out.
A quiet stream with gurgling water, a spattering of rocks along the bottom. My young child plays nearby, the water just high enough for him to splash in without worrying about him getting hurt. I sit on a rock, my baby nestled in my arms.
I opened my eyes to a prenatal yoga class full of other heavily pregnant women. I struggled to stand up from where I was snuggled into a nest of yoga pillows and blankets.
“Thank you for what you did for us, tree,” I sniffed, watching my kids hug the huge pine tree in our yard. They were probably getting sap on their shirts, but it didn’t matter. The tree was going to be gone soon. We each told it that we would miss it, calling out “Goodbye.”
“Do you have any recommendations on how to make being in nature more sciency?” a friend texted me.
“Come over here!” my husband called to me and my younger son as we dawdled down the trail.
“What?” I yelled back, squinting at him and my older son.
“Just come look!” he said.
“You can do it! You’re almost at the top!” I screamed as I huffed and puffed my way up a huge hill, following my five-year-old on his bike. A cookie stand with fresh-baked treats awaited us at the top. But first we had to get there.