As he gets older it’s amazing to see how my son’s interests develop.  At three he is already enjoying nature; animals, plants, trees, water, forests, flowers, anything outside really.  Sometimes it seems as though some parents don’t like to have their kids play outside.  I’ve seen some parents discourage their children from playing anywhere near anything that might get them dirty or wet.  I think that since I grew up in an urban area and didn’t have much chance to get outside, I’m trying to encourage him to do more than what I did.  My wife had the opposite experience, she grew up in a much more rural area, so she just expects him to be able to do what she could do.  Sometimes, Mr. C. would much prefer to explore in the forest than to go to the playground.   I’m always wondering what he’s going to be like when he’s an adult, so I can’t help but wonder how his interest in nature will affect him later.

This past weekend, we took a trip to a local nature preserve, Beaver Brook in Hollis, New Hampshire.  It’s a privately run area that offers hiking trails, a beautiful flower garden, classes for kids, and it’s probably ten degrees cooler than than at our house so it’s a good summer outing.

Beaver Brook

‘What’s that?’ he says as we walk through the formal garden, as I quickly jot down the name of any of the especially interesting flowers into the notes of my Iphone.

On one of the forest trails there is a small stone bridge over a stream.  Mr. C can spend hours throwing rocks into the stream and looking for good sticks to turn poke into the stream bed.

With all the yellow here I should include another link to the “Y” page of the A-Z Photo Challenge by Flickr Comments by FrizText !

Aha!  The jackpot.  He found a fallen tree, with what looked like an empty owl’s nest in hollowed out of the tree.  ’Hello, Hello, anybody in there?’ he said.

Don’t worry, I checked first, before he stuck that stick in there.

They do a good job with their garden design.  In some very small spaces they manage to create some imaginative designs.  Here’s a small frog pond.

One of the things I like about seeing other people’s blogs is getting to see photos of everyday scenes in places that I might not be able to get to.  Foreign street scenes, markets, cars, things that are not commonly presented either in the news or in places like travel magazines.  These are most likely just everyday scenes for the people who are posting them, so are not at all exotic to them.  So below is a common street scene for me, this is where we stopped for lunch.  Two sandwiches, fig newtons, goldfish crackers, orange juice.  This is just a few minutes from Beaver Brook, so we packed it all up and had a picnic under a pear tree.   What could be any more New England than a town square with a few shops and a church around the Town Green ?

This was my third Father’s Day.  I hope they are all this good.