The Best Thing I Ever Did with My Kids

I suffer from "nature deficit". I have known this for a long time but could never acurately describe it or put a name on it until I read the book called Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv. I am working my way sloooowwly through it and savoring it as I go. After I finish reading it, I plan to re-read it and highlight the portions that speak to me.

In the book, he makes a connection between "nature deficit" in children and the rise of all kinds of ADHD-type disorders. I think he might be on to something there. In my case, I grew up in a private house with a yard and my brother and I spent more time outdoors as kids than we did indoors. We also went a few times a week to one or the other of the many wonderful public park in the CA Bay Area and were also very "in to" camping as a family and did that for long stretches a couple of times a year. So we didn't have to "find" nature. It was all around us, even if a lot of the time it was cultivated nature (yards, parks, etc.) and we didn't have to go far to find it.

I remember going camping once when I was about 9 with my family. The day came when it was time to pack up and go home. I will never forget the strong desire I felt then to just burst out sobbing and of choking back the tears. Not that the vacation and fun time was over but because I had to leave all that quiet, beauty, solitude. And I remember being a little bit shocked that my reaction to the quiet, beauty and solitude was SO strong and wondering if that was normal. Also, as a kid, my secret desire was to be a forest ranger.

The  nature deficit started when I moved to Israel as an adult. Sometimes I wonder if I'm not at least borderline ADD (that's 'attention deficit' without the hyperactive part). My oldest daughter most definitely is ADD.

I am so in love with this book that I feel like typing it all out here but a) that's illegal and b) I don't have time. Suffice to say that on Monday, after two days of hellish heat, the weather was absolute perfection. What I call "perfect California weather". Pleasantly cool, brisk breeze, warm sun and not a hint of humidity. It was too perfect not to take advantage of and the message of the aforementioned book gave me the push I needed to try something with my kids that I'm usually too reluctant to give up my precious naptime to try - to take my kids to "find" nature. It was an experiment of sorts on my part - to see how much this contact with nature would affect my kids (and myself) - or not. Would they respond/connect? After only one excursion? To what extent would they respond?

We live about a 10 minute walk from the eastern edge of Rehovot and once you reach the edge you find open fields of wild wheat and oats and orange groves and cacti (how come the plural of "cactus" isn't "cactuses"???) criss-crossed by sandy one-lane tracks. Yesterday I packed up the kids, got out the baby backpack for E to ride in (he refused, of course) and schlepped them over there on foot. Y had gotten a mosquito bite on her arm the night before. She is terribly allergic - swells up like a sausage - and she was crying and wailing the whole way, "I wanna go hoooooooommme!" So I was trying to cajole her into continuing, all the while carrying E. Fun, right? So we got to the ring road that goes around the eastern edge of Rehovot, crossed the road, and the MINUTE we set foot on the dirt road that took us down a short incline and past the orange groves on both sides of the track, Y forgot all about her bite for the next TWO hours of the two mile circuitous route we took through the fields. The instant she stepped off the sidewalk and onto the dirt track, she was crouched down calling me over excitedly to inspect some interesting insect she'd found and that's the way the entire 2 hours that followed went. She was as good as gold, didn't complain once, she was happy and talkative and kept saying, "Ima, it's SO BEAUTIFUL here. What a beautiful view! I love this place!"

We had fun trying to identify the animal tracks. I showed her how to identify bird tracks (three toes forward, one back) and horse tracks. We saw other smaller tracks which we guessed were made by some sort of beetle and then later on we actually saw a big black beetle making the tracks. We saw an old pile of horse manure and I asked her if she knew what it was. She told me what it was and why it had lots of grass in it and then launched into this whole explanation about how dung beetles lay their eggs in it and then roll it up into balls and put them somewhere safe and when the baby beetles hatch they eat it. Don't ask me where she got THAT from but it wasn't from me.

We saw plenty of ant holes. One was quite big - about the size of a dime - with large ants rushing in and out the front door, each carrying a large clump of bright red earth which they would dump in a pile on the "doormat" and then rush back in to get another one. E was fascinated by that and nearly stood on his head to get his eyeball right up near the hole and see just where those funny ants were rushing back and forth to/from! We also found a sturdy stick for E that he used like a walking stick and he was thoroughly enjoyed mosey-ing down the sandy track hitting the sand with it and going, "Bash, bash, bash!" I told him to get all the bashing out of his system then and there. LOL.

The kids found a few ladybugs and Y had fun letting them crawl on her hand so of course E wanted to also. I told Y to put the ladybug on his hand and it tickled him so he shook it off immediately. He went to pick it up out of the sand and accidentally smushed it :-( It's interesting that as terrified as Y is of insects because of her mosquito bite allergy, she has NO qualms about handling a ladybug. She knows they won't hurt her. We LOVE ladybugs. Ladybugs have sort of been my kids' mascot since T was a baby.

We found a line of ants marching across the track busily carrying grains of wheat. On either side of the track at this point there had been fields of it growing but it had recently been mown and was still lying there - I assume drying. So we went and examined a stalk of wheat and I showed Y how the grains of wheat grow inside. We also found a stalk of wild oats and compared that to the wheat.

The large purple thistle blossoms have now all dried up and exploded with seed parachutes, so we had fun pulling tufts of those out of the flower head and letting them fly away.

Y asked me a million questions about things - not all of which I could answer. It was nice to see her "exercising" her curiosity!

We passed a very few other people out for a nature walk like we were but not many.

At one point, Y stopped dead still, closed her eyes and told me to shush. Then she told me every sound she could hear - the cars in the distance, a distant tractor plowing, the wind, the birds and a cricket. Then she told me to close my eyes and tell her what I heard. By the end of the walk, she really really was awake, alive, tuned in, hyperaware. She was noticing interesting things here and there that even I wouldn't have noticed. That is what is missing for me and I think for my kids also although they probably don't realize it because they don't know any other way of living. They have never lived in a house with a yard. This part of the book Last Child in the Woods really leaped out at me:

"Ideally, a child learns to negotiate both city and country. Mastering each environment builds the senses and common sense. Is there something special about the experience in nature, at least a quality that sharpens a young person's senses? Wonderful possibilities await researchers wanting to explore that unknown frontier. Surely the width and depth of nature, the added mystery - the catalogue of sounds and smells and sights - is larger than the relatively short and known list of urban stimulations. In the city or suburb, much of our energy is spent blocking sounds and stimulants. Do we actually hear the honking of cabs - do we want to? In a forest, our ears are open - the honking of geese overhead enlivens us, and when enlivened, human senses grow and develop."

This paragraph hit me between the eyes when I read it. THAT'S IT! I feel like I spend SO much time blocking the unpleasant/unaesthetic/jarring sounds, sights, smells where we live that everything gets blocked out. When we were out in the fields, I had to strain to hear the tractor and strain to hear the distant traffic so I had to "switch on" whereas normally, those would be things I would work hard to block because there's just too much of it going on around me where we live and it just grates on me.

I have to say that this nature walk with the kids was one of the most enjoyable and memorable things I have ever done with the kids and I hope to do it again soon.