Our family is visiting Durham, in the part of England called Northumberland.  Today we were going for a morning walk with our friend Penny down by the river Wear.  When we walked by an ice cream shop we noticed a momma duck and eleven little baby ducklings!  They were really cute!  They were small enough that I could hold one in my hand. (But I didn’t.) They had tiny little webbed feet and their bodies were covered with fluffy down with only teeny tiny wings.  They were pecking all over the ground, picking up little pieces of ice cream cones left the day before. 

We stopped to watch them.  The momma duck started to cross the pathway once, but turned around.  Kai and I found some pieces of broken ice cream cones along the path and we picked them up and we scattered them out for the little ducklings.  My dad was standing in the path really still, and some of the ducklings started to walk between his legs! 

Then, the momma duck saw an opening to cross the path to the river, and so she went across and all eleven ducklings followed behind her.  One by one they PLOPPED into the river!  A couple of them hopped back out again and then plopped in a second time.  And they all began swimming behind their momma.  But there was one problem.  The current was carrying two of them downstream under the bridge but on the wrong side of the bridge pier from their momma.  At first they were swimming slowly against the current. But then, suddenly, they ZOOMED around the corner!  They were safely on their way.  I wish you could have seen it, because it was SO cute!

Today was another beautiful sunny day on the island of Iona. We walked to the North beaches to hunt for special rocks and play in the sand and water.

On our way back, as we walked through the field, I went to a momma sheep that was laying on the ground, and I bent down and started to pet her.  It just stayed there, munching on the grass.  Her wool coat was fuzzy and soft.  I could feel the oil on the wool and it reminded me of the wool we had felt in the wool spinnery back in Vermont.

Later on the path, we came across a group of mommas and lambs.  Some of them were nursing.  But this one little baby lamb had an orange jacket on, and it was trying to find its mommy.  It was going from sheep to sheep, but they were butting him away—even the other baby lambs.  Finally, it found its momma and started to nurse.

By Naomi

Today we visited the Natick Organic Farm in Natick, Massachusetts.  This farm was first established way back in 1651 by Rev. John Eliot.  We saw 11 piglets, born on Valentine’s Day, and goats, sheep, two cows, bunnies, and chickens.  The name of our tour guide was Karen.  She and her friends showed us how Maple sap was turned into Maple sugar and syrup, both in olden times by the Native peoples of the region, and by colonists, and also how it’s done today.  Because of the cold winter, the sap wasn’t running very much yet, but today it warmed up enough that I got to put my finger out to taste a sample as it was coming out of the tree through the spile (that’s what the metal or wooden tube that they drive into the tree is called) and into the bucket.  It tastes like water and you can barely even taste any of the sweetness.

The sap rests in the roots of the tree, and in the spring, when it warms up, it starts running up through the trunk and out through the branches to feed the growing buds.  The sap is almost all water (97%) and only a tiny bit sugar (3%), so you have to boil it a long, long time before it becomes syrup and even longer to make maple sugar.  It takes about 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup.  And another thing is, a tree can’t start sharing its sap until it’s 40 years old (so the number 40 is the magic number for sap).

When we were learning about olden times, the guide needed a volunteer, and that was me!  I stood up and he placed a yoke on my shoulders, and then put a bucket on each end of the yoke.  A yoke is a long piece of carved wood that you put on your shoulders.  Then he pushed down on the yoke and asked me to take some steps to see how heavy it would be to carry if the buckets were full.  It was very, very heavy…but I would be able to do it.

Hi, I’m Naomi.  We’re going on sabbatical and I’m really excited because it will be fun to speak all kinds of different languages.   I’m really looking forward to finding out if we can see any caves and I’m really looking forward to seeing the Eiffel Tower of Paris.  We’ll be traveling on planes, trains, gondolas, ferries, trolleys, busses, bicycles, and cars—oh yeah, and feet, too.   If you want to, you can follow this blog and I’ll write more along the way.

Hi to all my friends at Pathfinder Elementary and my teacher Jennifer!