Today, the destination the kids and I chose was a dud. How were we to know? I stressed that this happens when you try new things that you never did before. Sometimes the event is less than anticipated, but sometimes you make a wonderful discovery. You never would have made the wonderful discovery if you hadn't taken the risk of something boring. We got to the place, and nothing seemed to be happening except that men were flying their model planes. That was interesting for about 10 or 15 minutes. Then we saw 2 shy alpacas that would cautiously approach the side of their pen, but when the kids reached out a hand, they shied away. There was a small herd of goats behind a fence that were slightly more friendly, and one of the visitors had a very cute pug dog that the kids could pet. They are all afraid of dogs, so this was a great stride forward, finding a quiet, small, friendly dog they could touch and see it wouldn't attack.
There were some counters with free stuff -- cookies and donut holes at one, snack sticks (smoked meat) and hot dogs at another, and pencils from the 4-H. The neat thing about the pencils was that the warmth of your hand changed their color.
The bounce house was deflated. They said it was too windy. No one was doing the hay rides, though the tractor was hitched to a hay wagon with bales of straw in it, and you could buy a pumpkin, but no one was manning the pumpkin-painting station. If all these things had been going on, it might have been more interesting. But the kids were easily bored. No one would try the free root beer floats except me.
We decided to leave, and as we pulled out, we saw the bounce house had been inflated. I asked the kids if they wanted to go back, but they didn't.
So we decided to go to a local state park we had passed, but on the way, we changed our minds and decided on the Cayuga Nature Center. I had never been there before and was curious. It was pretty quiet there, too. We saw a red-tailed hawk and a fox in cages outside, and inside some turtles and lizards and snakes. There were lots of stuffed animals (taxidermy), which I found more interesting than the kids did. The girl had trouble realizing that these were real animals that were dead and had been stuffed to look like they were alive. She kept insisting an artist made them. The feature I liked best was the tree house, which was a rustic structure on the edge of a small gorge, so it looked like you were quite high up, and you could climb up and down to different levels on ladders and stairs. The 5-year-old was a bit afraid of climbing down, and I noticed his older brother and sister were very solicitous of him, perhaps to the overprotective mode. I urged them to let him figure out how to climb down, helping a little, but not just lifting him down and preventing him from figuring out how to do it. It's amazing how these kids are not used to running free and wild as my daughter was. Partly, it's being in the city most of the time, and I think also it's the way the family protects the kids instead of letting them adventure and dare to do things on their own. If this trip did noting else, it helped the little one become more self-sufficient and independent. I mean, recently, I saw the mother shoveling food into his mouth. At 5, a kid should be able to handle his own fork and spoon and maybe even fumbling around cutting up meat. Someone shouldn't still be spoon-feeding that child! I notice the other day he didn't know how to untie his shoes and loosen the laces to get them off, so I started teaching him. I remember working at a day camp as a teenager, where we had a group of 4-year-olds, and in order to make our job easier when changing for swimming, I taught all the kids to tie their shoes by the end of the summer. My method was, after lunch, we spread out blankets, and the kids had to nap, and most didn't fall asleep anyway and were pretty bored. So I said anyone who wanted a shoe-tying lesson could get it at nap time. I had lots of takers, and soon, we didn't have such a big job tying shoes after swimming. I taught then one on one, never the same kid till everyone had a turn. Once they learned, they no longer needed shoe-tying lessons, so they had to nap. Still, everyone wanted to do it.
Sometimes, I wish I was doing more than teaching these kids English. They need to learn to tie shoes, ride bikes, skate, etc. They either teach themselves, as the older boy did with riding a 2-wheeler, or they have tricycles (the little one) or training wheels (the girl). Maybe teaching yourself is the best way. I learned that way. And I got my daughter to learn to ride a 2-wheeler, but she was never interested in riding her bike. Maybe I did it wrong.
While we were at the nature center, I saw a small garter snake and pointed it out, but it had slithered away before the kids saw it. But there were lots of garter snakes there, and the others I found the kids saw before they got into the grass and disappeared. The older boy was really turned off by snakes. I pointed out that the snakes were little, not poisonous, and more scared of us than we were of them. The girl cautiously was interested, the older boy was frightened, and the last snake, the little one chased to keep seeing it as long as he could before it escaped. When the older boy tried to call him away from the snake, I said to let him be, to see he couldn't catch it. Those snakes were amazingly quick at getting out of our way.
Last, the nature center had a room for small kids with benches where grown-ups could sit and watch the kids play. They had wonderful animal hand puppets. I loved a soft-eyed rabbit that you could stick your hand up into the head and make its face take on different expressions.
The little one attempted a rather difficult jigsaw puzzle and then asked me for help. He is getting better at speaking sentences like "Sandy, help me." I went over to help him, and soon his brother and sister were putting pieces in their places, too. In this case, doing it for him was probably a good idea, because it was a bit too complex for him, but he got to see how they did it.
When we got back to Ithaca, the boy looked for his house key and couldn't find it. I pulled into a parking lot till he located it to be sure he had it. I said I'd take them to he restaurant if the key couldn't be found. Otherwise they could go to the house. Their grandmother, her friend, and her friend's brother went off to walk in some state park and weren't back yet, but the boy has supervised his younger siblings for a short while before this, so I figured it was OK to leave the kids at the house.
So it was a good day, even though our original objective was a disappointment. I did get to see a drone sitting on a table, but not in the air -- it was too windy -- and I said I had only heard of drones in a rather negative light in the news, and the woman tried to give me the other side, that they were just a different form of remote-control aircraft and that you could do things like tricks with them. I wish I could have seen one perform. They can hover, not just fly forward like the regular model planes.
. . . 
