Mom – Page 8 – Breighton's Journey

Nov/Dec schedule madness

To say I have been busy lately is a mass understatement. Finals week was the first week of December this was also the week of the state 4-H indoor match in Newberry. We just drove up for the day for the tournament. I shot fairly well and managed a 4th place finish. Senior level is much harder and I really haven’t been practicing as much as I need to lately. Mom felt I was not taking enough study breaks so she kept coming in and force-feeding me smoothies to keep me going. I was really worried about my trig grade. I made a few errors on the midterm which meant to get an A for the term I needed an A on the final. A LOT of hours went into this preparation. I managed to pull out the A by 1 point! But an A is an A after all! I still have my 4.0 gpa at SPC.

We had a squirrel visitor, we have named him Tiny HUman (pronounced hoo-man). He liked to eat our leftover bread. The cats like to watch him. He even comes and knocks on the slider to let us know it is food time.

After finals we enjoyed a few days of fun at Busch Gardens. It was nice to be stress free for a while.

E and I helped decorate the Christmas tree. We got some cool new Harry Potter interactive ornaments this year.

I spent a lot of my winter break working on my insect collections. I am trying to get 1st place at the state 4-H Insectathon this year. It is a LOT of work and preparation but I am up for the challenge! My collection grew by over 100 specimen that needed cataloged and sorted. Hours and hours of curation and organizing was accomplished.

We kicked off another Forest Ecology season with 4-H with a fun day at Eagle Lake park. We met many new team members and I helped coach them on the material and then we all led groups on a fun scavenger hunt. We had to take photos of various items, including our team selfie.

We had a holiday party for 4-H at the extension office. We watched movies, had popcorn and other junk food and made mini gingerbread houses. Then we went over to see the lights at the Botanical Gardens and sang some carols along the way.

I am enjoying my time off from classes. I am not eager to start back up in January since I have a very hard class load. I know I will be fine, but I really needed this break!

4-H Entomology Day Camp

I helped to host the 4-H Thanksgiving Break Entomology Day Camp. We had 15 youth in camp. I spent many hours planning and organizing for this camp. Mom allowed me free rein to organize everything since I was earning volunteer hours for the program development and implementation. We had several art projects for the kids including: paining with super worms, create-a-bug and bug murals. We also learned about life cycles of insects and then the youth received super worm cultures so that they could observe the life-cycle. We spent a lot of time in the fields collecting. We even had a few kids really skilled at sweep netting and catching grasshoppers. One of the girls asked if I could help her dig in the compost bin, OF COURSE! Together with the help of a few other eager youth we found grubs, millipedes, ants, and beetles. Our snack-time was insect themed too. We had ants on a log (almond butter on celery topped with raisins), chocolate chirp cookies and flavored grasshoppers and mealworms. I was shocked that more of the girls were willing to try then the boys. It was a fantastic camp and I hope to host many more of these when I have free time in my college schedule.

ENT SOC St. Louis 2019

Dad and I flew up to St. Louis for a week. I was attending the Entomological Society of Americas annual conference. We arrived a few days early and enjoyed some old haunts in the area. I went to City Museum twice and also to the St. Louis Zoo to see the Insectarium.

The conference was epic. I really had a fun time attending various outreach programs, speakers and seminars. I absolutely loved the Linnaean Games! It was wonderful to cheer on UF and see them win this year.

One of the programs I attended we worked on building this giant ant out of paper. We had it hanging from strings that were tossed over the rafters. After quite a lot of work and near completion we were instructed that we had to dismantle our creation due to some rules violation. I guess no one every asked permission or if they did, asked the wrong person.

This conference made me fairly solid in my future path that I for sure want to study entomology. I am still stuck on what my focus will be. I really enjoy the outreach part of it, teaching others what I know but also the collection and research end of it. I hope to continue to go to these conferences so that I can continue to be exposed to more in this field.

4-H Clear Kayak Adventure

We booked with amazing trip with CMERA for our 4-H club. We had a few spots open so were about to bring some non-club members and friends. We went up north to the Weeki Wachee River. The kayaks were completely clear and we could see everything the spring fed waters. We saw a lot of manatees and were able to observe them for a long time. We even saw quite a few calves in the warm waters for winter. We had a biologist guide who filled us with knowledge of all things along the river. I love doing outings with CMERA and 4-H.

Only half of the kayak crew. We were all cold, hungry and wet!

Gall Hike with Ms. Christine

Today our club had a guest speaking and hike guide, Ms. Christine Leonard. She is a grad student at USF and part of her studies have led her to have learned a LOT about galls. Galls are made by various insects so this topic was perfect for our 4-H Entomology club. We learned what we need to look for, found samples, identified samples and even looked inside samples. It was really amazing how many various ways galls appear and how much we had overlooked them in the past. We are now junior gall experts and are eager to share our knowledge with the world!