Oct 6
After months of teasing us with cruising along furniture, frequent bear-crawling, and occasionally standing up on her own, Cutie finally started walking unassisted in the last couple of days! Once she gets a bit more confident, we can hopefully have four children who walk on their own. And just in time!; Winter, which brings the additional challenge of carrying a bundled-up child (when you’re bundled up yourself), is right around the corner!
This is the second post of “nature invades our home.” Read the first part about our butterfly adventures!
Our sneaky skink (click for a larger view)
Following on the heels of our butterfly adventure comes another chapter in nature invading our home! Coming into our basement last week, I was startled (though not as much as I would have thought) to see a large black lizard sitting on the floor. When I say “large,” it turned out to be quite small, but seeing a lizard of any size on my basement floor amplified its size.
I was equally shocked to hear, when I told the rest of the family of my find, that the kids had already spotted it – twice – and though it was rather clever (why they failed to inform me of this continues to escape me).
Three Monarch butterflies hang from their chrysalises (click the photo for a larger version)
For the last few years, I have planned to mail away for butterfly larvae (i.e., caterpillars) so the kids could get the opportunity to “raise” butterflies. But the time always got away from me and I consistently missed the window of opportunity; after all, I didn’t want to have the poor things hatch in the middle of Winter when they wouldn’t have a chance to migrate.
This year, a good friend who lives nearby was kind enough to text me one night to ask if I’d be interested in snagging a couple of Monarch caterpillars that were covering a milkweed bush he had planted for just that purpose. I jumped at the idea!
It’s a mild summer afternoon, a rarity in the seemingly unending scorching weeks that we’ve had this season. After a busy morning of cooking with Rebecca during our quarterly freezer “cook days,” I decide to indulge in two of my favorite vices: a cigar and a beer. Taking my e-reader, I retire to our backyard, a little postage-stamp area that we invested time and money in to create a sort of outdoor haven. Today, I plan to enjoy that investment for forty-five minutes or so.
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