Friends, fieldtrips and fun!

This time of year is so much fun for friends, fieldtrips and fun! This week's weather has been spectacular, and our homeschool group hosted a fun picnic and fieldtrip to the Tennessee River Gardens & Nature Preserve/Butterfly Pavilion, a private/non-profit organization, which is a spectacular wildflower garden and wildlife preserve in the heart of the Tennessee River Gorge!

Once everyone arrived (we had over 200 people), we took a short, guided hike, which included wildflower gardens, duck and rainbow trout ponds, a real fossil bank and a Great Blue Heron rookery!

This is a photo from the rainbow trout pond...Greg W. wouldn't believe it! They were HUGE! And our guide had each of the kids take a handful of fish food (no, not Ben and Jerry's, Jen!) and toss it into the water at the same time...the fish went CRAZY....like piranhas! It was an amazing site to see!

After the hike, some of us enjoyed a tour of an enclosed butterfly pavilion which houses 20 native butterfly species both in flight and in ALL stages of metamorphosis. Open late spring to early fall, the pavilion includes eggs, larvae, chrysalis and butterfly, as well as species-specific host plants and nectar plants. We've been there at a different time of the year, and there seemed to be more butterflies then, but it was still fun to watch the kids' faces as they found a chrysalis or butterfly!

After a long afternoon picnicking, playing and visiting with friends on the grassy banks of the TN River, picking the last of the beautiful summer wildflowers, and doing some art sketches, we went on home....perhaps it was just all too much for this little Lovey, who fell asleep sitting at the dining table!