We saw lots of wildlife on our visit to Hort Park - including our first wild snake.
This used to be MsE's favorite park, but it's been so long that she had forgotten. She was so against going that I sent everyone else down ahead of us, let her have a long cuddle in her blankey "Blue" and then finally picked her up and forcibly carried her downstairs, without even her shoes on. By the time we got on the bus, she was more on board for an outing.
Actually the girls were all thrilled that we got on a Double Decker Bus. We headed up to the top, wear MsI kept shrieking, "The Bus' wheels are going around" and "We're going so fast". You would have thought we were at Universal Studios and not on a regular public transit bus.
When we got home MsE came to me and apologized for yelling and said she had forgotten about that park. But really, it is that hard for MsE to leave the house since Lock Down. She's very afraid there will be monkeys or ants.
We never see monkeys; We've only seen them on 2 occasions in over a year. But today, I saw MsE stand on the table in her room, because she thought she saw a sugar ant on the floor. They're always around, but we couldn't find that one ant in question. But on the other hand I also saw her intentionally leap over a long row of rather large ants to get onto the playground. I just hope we didn't add snakes to the list of fears.
MsE has been getting much better about going down to the playground in the last few weeks, but now we're trying to get farther away from home. She's okay with the Mall, in fact she loves when there's a crowd, but it's the outside places that are hard for her now.
At Hort Park we checked out the Turtle Pond and then strolled through the gardens to the bottom where the playgrounds are. We stopped to smell the fragrant Jasmine, and followed a number of butterflies. The Grown-ups admired all the herbs, fruit and vegetables going in the gardens. We heard some Ravens calling and discovered a new Sunbird with a very red tail. MsE and I have not yet discovered it's name, but we'd never seen one like it before.
After a while we sat down for a picnic snack. Our Helper and the girls chose a table in the sun and laid out our blanket and snacks and handed out our water bottles. Just as I was wondering why we hadn't settled on the nice shady table under a canopy of vines, I watched an Oriental Whip Snake wind out of that canopy and down the pole, within a foot of the table where we would have all been sitting. It then slither away across the path, and into a new garden bed. Our Helper said she considered that table, but something about it just didn't seem right.
Whip Snakes are "mildly venomous." Apparently they're not venomous enough to harm humans, but I'd rather not try that theory out with small children. The Gardener about 10 feet away, didn't even look up, as we were calling out "snake," so I'm sure they see them all the time.
After our snack and our snake, we moved to a different area and had a game of "Corona Virus." If you get tagged, you have the Corona Virus and become a tagger too, until everyone has the Corona Virus. The playground kids made this one up.
The girls just reminded me that a snake slithered across our path at home one night in the dark when we hadn't been living in Singapore very long. I probably didn't realize at the time that many snakes here at venomous. Guess it wasn't our first snake today.
The girls were still a bit worried about the snake on our walk out of the park, so I entertained them with stories of Auntie Colleen's childhood snake adventures: snakes in buckets, snakes in bug cages, snakes in cars - They couldn't get enough of those.