Fort Worth Nature Center

I love being in nature. It restores me. I want my children to enjoy nature like I do. So I try to get them out in natural settings as much as possible. It's also good for the wiggles. It also gives us a space for exploration. I think little minds need time to just explore and not be rushed. So many places (museums especially) I see adults rushing children from one thing to the other. Children need time to soak in information. They need to have time to experience something. When I go to a museum with my children I like to let them take their time on the things that interest them. I don't want to rush through so we can see everything in the whole dang place. That defeats the point, to me. Tangent! Ok, so back to nature. I like the slow pace that nature promotes. I like the peace it brings. I think we need more of that in our lives. Also, I think too many people are so cut off from the natural world around them. When we eat meat we don't go hunt the animal, kill it, skin it and cut it up, then cook and eat it. We go buy frozen chicken breasts that have no bones, no skin, no fat. And no one realizes the waste that goes into that product. What happened to the rest of the chicken? No, they don't think about that. Another tangent! Sorry, I'm on one. But this is something I think about. A lot. I think a lot of the problems that we are faced with in our world today come from people not connecting things in their life to the world around them. We don't connect the chicken breasts with the rest of the chicken and wonder what happened to it. We don't connect TV dinners with what they really should be and how they got the way they are. We don't connect the labor it takes to make a truly good product. We just want to buy cheap junk from Wal Mart because we can't really appreciate the true value of a product well made by skilled hands. Why? Because we have no idea what it takes to make things. We have gotten too far away from making things, from producing things for ourselves. So that is another reason to be in nature. To connect ourselves to the world around us.

We spent a day (or about four hours) at the Fort Worth Nature Center. It was wonderful. We visited the visitor center and looked at the animals, and we did some hiking. But my favorite part was right at the end. We found a little trail and followed it to an area where quite a lot of erosion had occurred. There was a cliff of rock and sand. So we talked about erosion. And then we found sandstone and sand. It was really neat because there was sandstone, sand, and almost formed sandstone that was easy to break apart. So we talked about how sandstone is formed. Then we tried to form it out of the sand. We found out we couldn't put enough pressure on it to get it to stick very well together. So that taught (I hope) the kids how hard it would have to be pressed to turn into a stone. Then Lily wondered what pushed it hard enough to actually turn it into stone. So we talked about that. It was a really neat conversation, and it was such a perfect place to talk about those subjects. It really had a chance to click and sink in, I think. Obviously they are young and probably won't remember much, but maybe they will. And maybe it would make it easier for them to understand later on.