We are a creative homeschooling family of 3. I have homeschooled my 2 boys from the start and we do lots of unit studies and get out into our beautiful part of the world as often as we can.
As the boys are getting older and we are getting busier I find I am posting less about our journey but will continue to update occasionally.

Saturday, December 13, 2008

Snakes in the Garden

We are having a few reptilian visitors lately.

Mr5 had a close encounter with a green tree snake, they are often seen rapidly climbing up the she oaks, sometimes green sometimes brown. One year when Mr5 was a little baby The boys and I were playing on our lounge room floor when one meandered through the house, I swear our big boy levitated that day, landing safely on the lounge behind his Mummy and instinctively reaching around and grabbing his baby brother to shield behind me as well. I quietly slid the screen door open and we watched the snake silently slither between our two sleeping dobermans on the door mat. That was a very exciting day, and DH got a phone call at work a few minutes later to bring home cement and weather strips to keep snakes out of our house.

We have had a beautiful red belly black snake hanging around for a few days. The boys were on full alert, boots and jeans in the garden- I see it as a great learning opportunity. They can learn to be careful instead of just tearing around heedless of everything else.




They can learn to look and listen quietly- this is one they both need a bit of practice on- LOL. We watched its slow and careful progress from down the back , up through the trees, the garden, it even visited the sand pit, next it was spotted in the logs in the frog pond garden and a couple of day later DH spotted it up at the front fence. We get lots of red belly black snakes visiting our place on their journeying, they all come from down the back paddock and make their way towards the river through our land. We joke about being on the red belly black snake highway and find lots of snake skins in the gardens and all around the house, we have done for years. This year we have new neighbors (after living here for 8 years without neighbors) and the Mr next door fancies himself as a bit of a Steve Irwin so about 10 minutes after DH saw the snake up the front Mr next door decides to 'help' it by picking it up by the tail and carrying it dragging and dangling from his outstretched arm right back up the back paddock where the poor thing had started from. And the poor snake was pretty cranky by then so Mr next door threw it as far away from him as he could. grrr.

So we discussed with the boys how silly Mr next door was and we discussed with Mr next door how the snakes have been travelling this route for some time without his help, and actually they are going towards the river not back up the paddock, so as the season pans out we will see how many other snakes need his assistance. I might need some tactful way discussing his wildlife handling skills, he had a coucall bird the other day going berserk in his hands while he showed my boys. I prefer they use binoculars or their eyes from a distance and leave the wildlife to do their own thing. More and more learning opportunities.

We have also been getting a few bearded dragons visiting and have picked up a few long necked turtles on the road.

Laying in bed last night I remembered another noteworthy snake incident- last summer we were trying to do some renovations to our house and it rained for the entire uni break- so we were doing as much as we could under the cover of our verandah- hence it was a crowded space filled with secondhand hardwood weatherboards being sanded, planed and painted with primer- chaos reigned.


Now onto this same verandah go two sliding glass doors, that get left open with just the screen door closed in summer. One leads into the lounge room and is the main front door and one leads into our bedroom, the bedroom screen door can be a bit tricky to close. One day I was happily typing away at my computer when Mr5 who was then only 4 said oh look Mummy a snakeskin- and he was right a rather large 1.5 m snake had been in my bedroom and shed its skin and gone back out all without being seen.... It took a while to be comfortable in my room again and it was rather scary walking around in the dark at night. We are however very careful about closing that door these days and I tend to keep it locked.

1 comment:

Pagan Rach said...

Hi!
We had a snake in our yard a month or so ago, but unfortunately the dog killed it :(
I'll add a link to you on my blog :)