Children are naturally curious creatures and with so many under one roof coupled with the fact that we homeschool, we are frequently looking things up to answer the various questions that arise. For instance, the children found that one of the chickens had laid an egg the size of a cherry tomato. We looked it up and found out that such an egg occurs on occasion, that there is no yolk inside and that they are called – by some – fairy eggs.
Here are some other fairy eggs we found this week:
- My son asked if worms had eyes. They don’t, but they have five hearts. They also breath through their skin which is why they come out of the earth when it rains. All the water in the soil after a hard rain makes it hard for them to breath.
Earthworms, in fact, are not only wonderful for soil, but they’re pretty darn fascinating. We have a book on them and the children voluntarily read through it for fun. Yes, you read that right. Because worms are fascinating.
- My daughter is studying the Punic Wars. Rome ‘s land force was unsurpassed but they were’t so great on the water. Carthage had an excellent navy. To overcome their disadvantage on the water, the Romans came up with a contraption called a Corvus. It was a gangplank with a long spike on the end that came down on the enemy’s ship and hooked onto the enemy’s deck. The Roman soldiers would then rush onto the boat and fight as they did on land, thereby nullifying their sea weakness.
- Hannibal, the General of Carthage, famously took elephants over the Alps in a surprise attack on Rome from the north. Reading about it, we learned that elephants had been used against Rome’s infantry in the past and had shattered their morale. For a long time, the legionnaires would not fight against elephants until they captured some and learned their weak spots. It’s difficult for me to imagine something as gentle and majestic as elephants being used in warfare. But used they were in the ancient world until they eventually fell out of favor. (They’re even mentioned in a battle in the first book of Maccabees.)
- My oldest son is reading a book about Saint Dominic so we’ve been learning a lot about the Albigenses heresy that spread throughout Southern France in the 12th and 13th centuries. It is certainly an interesting heresy. It was Neo-Manichaean, so they considered the material world evil. Catholic Answers had a very thorough write-up on it.
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