Abel is something of a grass connoisseur. When we go for our daily walk out in the pasture, our one year old son wants to get out and play. When we are in Oregon he prefers to play in a nice patch of bent grass (in the genus Agrostis). He finds this to be good baby habitat because it is short and green and soft and he can play and roll and move around without any trouble.
Along with cattle, wildebeest, grasshopper-sparrows and many other animals in the ecosystem, is hardwired this way, preferring this sort of habitat. (Though he also really likes trash, so we can only rely on him to a certain extent when choosing nice places to picnic.) When we are in California, there is no Agrostis to play in, but he still wants to play in grasses that are bent, bent over by the hooves of the cattle so they are still short, soft, and green and ripe for the playing for a baby who, as of this point, prefers being a quadruped to a biped.
While Abel is playing, his parents have no choice but to take a step back from their busy lives. Often this means that they do the things that they gravitate to naturally, Hanna wrangling babies and taking pictures, Nate daydreaming about the relationship between large animals, savanna vegetation and technology.
This blog is a little green patch on the internet, where we give a glimpse of that world to others that might be interested.