Wesselman Woods

The kids and I have declared Friday Fun Day. We try to do something different and entertaining every week. This past Friday, on a last minute whim, we went to one of my favoritest places in Evansville, Wesselman Woods. The new nature center just barely opened. There still isn't much there. First we hit the Toddler Tales, which was not all that impressive. There were only four other families there, which was nice, though, and they all left right away which gave Zoe, Jed and me run of the whole 200 acres all to ourselves! Only one young lady stayed to run the nature center and otherwise we were literally alone, which is just the way we like it.
We went out on a nice little hike through the woods where we collected about 25 different kinds of leaves (I finally had to cut back on the leaf collecting because there are seriously ten million different trees here in Evv, and we were progressing at the rate of about .000009 miles per hour.) We spied all kinds of cool trees and and flowers and wildlife.
Over at the pond, we made friends with a little bird that followed us around for about thirty minutes. There's a lovely little field by the pond where the kids ran around and watched the birds and looked for turtles for quite a while. My favorite season in Evansville is Honeysuckle Summer, when the woods are loaded with flowering honeysuckle flowers that make the air thick with gorgeous perfume. This year seems even more delightful than ever, and Jed kept bringing me more flowers to smell.
Jed's favorite part of Wesselman's is the bird-watching area in the nature center. He got SO EXCITED we had to go back there about four times and look for all the different kinds of birds. They really do have quite the setup. Now I want a birdwatching area in my backyard!


He's particularly over the moon in this photo because we just saw a set of wild turkeys come strutting through! Zoe and Jed both love the little binoculars they have there to use. Zoe didn't quite catch the vision of looking "through" the lenses, but she did thoroughly enjoy holding them up to her eyes and squinting at the floor...

Jed totally got it, this time.

Here is one of the Master Gardener wildlife gardens. I finally had to drag them out of the woods, several hours later, insisting that we eat because Mom might starve to death soon. As we walked out, Jed commented "What a lovely time we've had today, Mom. I like this place." Me, too, Jed. And I love having a little boy who enjoys going there as much as I do. He really is my best little buddy.