This and that

Molly went to preschool this morning and came home saying she went to music AND science today. She said they learned about plants today, but that's all I could get out of her. At not quite four she already tells me "oh, nothing" when I ask her what she did at school. I though that didn't start until they were at least 5 or 6.
We ate a very healthy lunch at McDonald's on our way to a play date with my friend, Monika and her sons, Ben and Timothy. Ben is Molly's age and Timothy is 16 months old. On our way to the park to play Molly was playing with the dragon she got in her happy meal. At one point she said "the dragon can't escape from the puma!" I have no idea where she learned about pumas. She spent her lunch counting and subtracting fries in Spanish. I didn't know she could count in Spanish, well, I should clarify. I knew she could say the numbers but I didn't know she could actually count objects and understood the English equivalent of the Spanish words she was using. So watching Dora and Diego does do *something,* let that be a lesson, ha!

We beat our friends to the park by about 20 minutes so Molly and I went exploring the big field behind the park. and I actually learned something. Now this may seem ridiculous to some, but I've never really paid any attention to dandelions, other than blowing the fluff in my yard when I was little and NOT blowing the fluff in my yard as an adult. So in this field there were a ton of dandelions, as well as quite a few other wild flowers. I started picking dandelions and blowing the fluff, because hey, it's not my yard! Then I started to look at all the other dandelions and I saw how they grow and mature and it was actually really interesting. So when we got home I went out in the back yard and took pictures of the dandelions. I told Molly all about it as well, but she didn't find it nearly as fascinating as I did, haha!

So here is what I learned:

Here is an unopened flower, pretty self explanatory.

Now an open flower, as we have all seen at least a thousand times.

Upon closer look, and tearing the flower in half you can see that inside are very immature versions of the seeds and "parachutes." I pulled them out so you could see.

Now here is where it gets interesting (at least to me, mind you I am a bit of a dork).
The flower is starting to close and the little skinny things in the middle called ray flowers are starting to turn brown.

Now the flower has closed up completely and the ray flowers have turned very brown. I always thought, that the flower died here and the seed pod fluffy things were a separate part of the plant that grew at a different time. That doesn't seem very reasonable now that I think about it, but I had no reason to wonder. Anyway I digress. Alas, the flower is not dying, it's changing.

If I tear it apart now, it's starting to resemble the regular fluffy seeds more. The yellow ray flowers are easy to completely separate from the seeds, whereas before they were kind of one unit.

If I tear it in half, it's very apparent what it's becoming.

So after that, all of the yellow ray flowers fall off, and it looks like an unopened fluffy seed thingy.

Oddly enough, I don't have any mature seed pods in the back yard right now, but we all know what they look like.

So there's the life cycle of a dandelion, I hope I haven't bored anyone to tears, haha. I did learn with some internet research that the flower can turn into the seed head overnight! That is much quicker than I thought it could be.

Molly's little indoor garden is starting to sprout, well at least the lettuce OR marigolds are, I didn't mark which end was which, but all of the seeds on one end are sprouting.

I have no idea what tomorrow will hold, but I'll keep ya posted :-)