Biospharenhaus: Our Last Field Trip with Our Germany Homeschool Group

This was a bittersweet day for us.  We have had so many wonderful field trips with our homeschool group and this was a good one, but our last one as well.  We didn't have a car that day, so two of our good friends came with their vans to pick our family up that morning.  It was an hour drive away and both vans put on a movie for the kids.  We never do movies in the car because of Drew's car sickness, but he has been doing so much better and I thought it would be okay.  It wasn't.  Suddenly, Judah says, "Drew is throwing up, Mom."  I was so not prepared for that.  In our van, we have all the supplies to deal with that since it used to be a nearly everyday occurrence, but I had nothing.  No clothes, no cleaning supplies, nada.  Luckily, he hadn't had any too nasty for breakfast and it was mostly water because he had to wear the clothes all day.  Yuck.

This field trip featured a tree top walk, followed by a picnic and hike, and ended with another falcon show.  One of the moms asked if it was stroller friendly, and these pictures should answer that question loud and clear.

I had to put Bobby in the Ergo for this part because I had to help Judah get from disk to disk.  He kept wanting to take a step to the next one and then let go with his hands completely to reach for the next chain with both hands.  There was a net underneath, but who really wants to test that out?

At the end of the tree top path, there was a huge slide and a baby slide to go down before heading back.

During the hike we came to the barefoot water exploration area.  The kids all loved taking their shoes off and wading in the little stream.  They could've played like that for hours if the little ones hadn't gotten so tired.

I was impressed that Bobby asked to take off his shoes and wade in the water.

The falcon show was small compared to both Freisen and Potzberg with only three birds brought out individually, but it turned out to be pretty awesome when he was choosing kids from the crowd to come down and assist him.  The third bird was brought out in a wooden box and one child from the crowd was told to hold onto the string attached to the door of the wooden box.  Another girl was told to put on the falcon glove and stand in a certain place and hold a dead headless baby chick for the bird to come eat.  The German girl got nervous at the last minute and went to sit down.  The guy called Drew out of the crowd to take her place.  He seemed nervous as well, but he did what the man said.  He told me later that the man was joking with him about the chick being for him to eat instead of the bird.  (All of this was in German, by the way.  I don't think he spoke English.)  Anyway, I have a video of some of it at the bottom of this post.  From the sounds inside the box, everyone though it was a huge scary bird.  What a surprise we all got when a very small falcon flew out, straight to Drew, grabbed the chick and flew to the perch to eat it.  Drew had a much better end to the day than his beginning.

That's Drew in the red shirt.