Nature Play Homeschool Group

We finally made it to a meetup of the Nature Play group!  I read the book Last Child in the Woods when it came out (loved it!) and have always believed in letting the kids have unstructured play time in the woods, so I've been looking forward to going to one of these Nature Play Meetups since before we moved down here.  I'll admit to having been a bit worried that the parks down here would be more concrete jungle than I'd like.

We met up at Moss Park, which is a bit of a drive for us.  I was also slightly unprepared for the tolls, and I didn't know that there was a fee to get in to the park, so we had to turn around and find an ATM.  Side-rant:  there are a LOT of toll roads down here, and a significant portion of them are ONLY exact coins.  So even if you have a $20, if you don't have three quarters, you're out of luck.  It's really annoying, but now I have a transponder, so going new places shouldn't be as stressful.

Anyway.  When we got to the park, there was only one other family there with a couple of youngish boys (7 and 5 maybe?).  The mom was super nice and showed us around, warning us to watch out for spider webs (Google 'banana spiders' - ugh!).  There were huge dirt piles at the parking area - dump trucks kept coming and unloading while we were there, too - and the kids had a lot of fun climbing the smaller ones.  We were a little nervous about this one expansive 'complex' of dirt mounds that were really high and had been obviously built upon over and over - we thought there was a risk of it collapsing, so we stuck to a single mound that seemed more stable.

Fiona and Niall had fun playing on the dirt mound and exploring the brush, but Colwyn and Lachlann got a little bored - probably because I think this group skews young.  But they did have fun catching lizards!

We had a good time, but I'm not sure how long we'll last with this group.  I think there may be some issues that might get annoying over time (stories for another post!), but we'll see.