The Brook

It's almost brook time! The kids and I have been going by every couple of days to see if the water line has lowered. Oh, we can't wait. Jonah's been begging to go down, but as they can see, the water is pretty vicious this time of year, and we'll be down there as soon as it settles.

Oh, the brook and all its glories!

I'm sure the place is enchanted - it's just unreal!

We went down every day it wasn't pouring last summer, and it was a new adventure every time, I couldn't believe all there was to discover!
In early May it acts as a spawning ground for a couple hundred algae eating fish, a fact which we didn't discover until we had gone back down with a bucket of worms and a rod, and fished for 45 minutes, holding the hook right in front of their noses without one bite.



It was so fun to watch them, they flipped and flopped and splashed the water, and Jonah went in, in his rubber boots, and they just swam all around him.


It's the home to a couple toads, Jonah has caught a few times...

And a very quick frog Christina caught one day to our surprise! She was fast!

There's two fish that swim from one shady side of the brook to the other, jumping for a bug ever once in a while...



And two larger ones that live right under the bridge, and look just like the rocks if they don't move.

The ducks go by every once in a while.

There were toads the size of a quarter,...



And toads half the size of a pea!




And the dragonflies...



They are the icing on the cake! About 40 dragonflies fly around, and they're the flirtiest little things! They would land on your knee, and look up into your face, then land on your hand, then land on your shoulder, fly away, and come back again. In five minutes they would land on you a couple dozen times, sometimes, and we laughed and laughed one day, watching a dragonfly floating down the brook perched on a leaf.
Those were our favourite dragonflies, but there were some other ones which would come to visit as well, a yellow one came by one day and was dipping his tail in the water, over and over and over again, what a laugh!



We've explored up and down the brook, found the best skipping rocks, and finding little treasures.

And then there's the day we brought down a bottle of bubbles, and we blew them over the water, and they bounced and bounced off the surface of the water. Then the kids dipped themselves in the water, and when I blew bubbles at them, hundreds of bubbles would stick to their arms and bellies. We'll be doing that again, Mariah would love it!

The smells,


The sights,


The sounds,


I can feel it all! It won't be long now!