Friday, July 01, 2005

Happy Dominion Day

The Squirrels celebrated Canada Day today by taking the squirrellings to a nearby "heritage crossroads" (what used to be called a pioneer village) and then out for pizza (well, it's red and white anyway). Ponytails made beautiful paper flags for everyone. (Not all the squirrels are as good at drawing maple leaves as she is!)

This particular "village" is supposed to represent life around here in 1914, and on Canada Day--which was Dominion Day in 1914--admission is free and the village storefronts are decorated in red, white and blue. No, not the Stars and Stripes--the Union Jack--which was our flag in 1914.

The Apprentice and Ponytails had been to the village before, although Ponytails didn't remember much. Crayons had never been there before, and it was a lot of fun to see her reacting to things that until now had only been pictures in books. Even a stream, with a covered bridge over it (and maybe a troll underneath?), was something she does not see often. "Oh, a Stream!" She knows the word, but seeing the real thing is different. A locomotive, a pump, washboards, a loom, a chicken coop (which inspired a steady stream of "cluck, cluck, cluck" from Crayons), a really woolly sheep, three black pigs in a pen, big black woodstoves like the one in Paul Galdone's Little Red Hen...she also got to touch a slice taken off the bottom of a horse's hoof by the blacksmith! The late Joan Bodger wrote a book called How the Heather Looks, about her family's trip to England to look for things like Sherwood Forest and Wind in the Willows country; this was no less of a "books coming to life" trip for Crayons.

P.S. If you really want to know what kind of animals we saw, you can click here.

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