On Mother’s Day this past Sunday we pulled out a perennial favorite program, Pollination Sensation. The kids dissect flowers to find the pollen-bearing anthers and the sticky styles, then they build pollinator fishing rods: cotton balls tied to decorated paper butterfly wings, all hung with fishing line from a stick. The kids flit around the garden, dunking their butterflies into open flowers and checking for the pollen grains. It’s the best.

Raymond (8 year old boy wearing a Pokemon tee shirt): This pollinator fishing rod is just like a Pokemon fishing rod!

Me: Oh yeah? How does a Pokemon fishing rod work?

Raymond: Well, it works like this, but it catches Pokemon.

Me: What do you have to do to catch one?

Raymond: You just play it cool, act like you’re not interested, then they kind of come to you.

A few families lingered in the garden after the program was finished, parents planted on benches, kids running back and forth with various trophies: spotted slugs, skeletonized leaves. Two kids had found a pillbug under a rock, and they were passing it back and forth, watching it curl and uncurl.

We decided to make a maze for it. They arranged wood chips into a branching tributary, and we made bets about which route the bug would take. 10 points if you guess right: