Sunday, April 29, 2007 ;
3:14 PM
Warning again: this post is full of dandelions.
If you don't like plants and flowers (or absolutely had enough), skip this post. Also, if you had enough of A level Bio (esp the plant part), and may suffer from violent convulsions if you come across yet another impt keyword {which i purposely put in bold}, then skip this post. :-)
We had some straggly yellow wildflowers that finally formed the dandelion clocks now. But the joy was in finding a whole field of them nearby and we went there as a whole family after Bible class on Wed... Although it was 8.30pm, it was still bright, so we took some pics till about 9+ when it turned dark.
Then the next morning, I brought the kids out for our walk, and they requested to go there again.
I didn't realise how much they liked it (blowing the dandelion
achene or clock) until we went home and ds1 drew many pictures of the activity. Here's one of them, which shows the whole family, that's why I like it. There are others he drew just himself, or he and daddy and he and me, and he and ds2.
His drawings have a little more detail now, at least we start to have some hair. Although he knows I have longer hair than the rest of them, I don't know why he draws so little on my head and it is curved to one side somemore. Haha, very funny.
I taught him some phonics before, so he wrote D for daddy and A for my name, (not sure why not M for mummy), cos he couldn't spell out the whole word.
Then I asked him what was daddy holding in the other hand, he said "camera" cos daddy was taking pictures of us. The camera looked like an iron... haha. And all those "lollipops" we are holding are the dandelions... :-)
Ok, so the yellow "flower" we see is actually a flower head, which consists of many tiny flowers. That's why each flower later develops and a seed results from each tiny flower. And therefore you have a whole head of seeds to blow away...
Taraxacum is the genus name. (see Wikipedia for more info). What's interesting is, the dandelion is commonly
triploid, so it is supposed to be
sterile. But it reproduces by
apomixis. (dear students, rem learning this?)
Amazing fact: there are usually 54- 72 seeds per head but some can form up to 2000. (not verified cos I found it on Wiki).
As far as we are concerned, the more seeds the better. They are so fun to blow away... ds2 was so mesmerized by the flying seeds he spent a lot of time just looking at us blow before trying it himself.
But ds2 blows very weakly, so a lot of the seeds end up on his clothes (see below left). Then he had some on his hair too, and in a very sweet gesture, I saw ds1 dusting them off for ds2 (below right).
Took a close up with and without flash and got very different effects, both are interesting to me:
We spent a lot of time just frolicking in the field. See how they use it as a sword too?
When ds2 blows, a lot of saliva comes out of his mouth as well. Reminds you of their birthday cakes right? :-) How they try to blow their candles but the cake gets contaminated with lots of saliva spray instead. See his pursed lips trying hard to blow below:
And the flying seeds are so pretty, I couldn't even capture the magic properly here:
Lovely...
rainbows every day, do not worry for the morrow
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