This beautiful black swallowtail visited our purple butterfly bush while I was watering the butterfly garden yesterday. Somehow I feel rather triumphant about this. Too bad Calvin was napping at the time...
gardening, nature, photography 
Well, it wasn't really a picnic, just dinner on the deck, which is where we eat most nights, but it did rainbow on us - twice. We were sitting there having a relaxing dinner and out of nowhere - wham! - a rainbow. And then, as if one wasn't enough, there was suddenly a second one, much lighter than the first, but just as much a rainbow if you please. Calvin was probably a mixture of bewildered
and excited, and after it faded, and for the rest of the night, we were privy to his continual chorus of "rainbow all gone." It's kind of hard to explain wonder and majesty to someone who is yet innocent enough to see the whole world as wonder and majesty and who has not yet been disillusioned by reality, but we'd take innocence over disillusionment any day.
...to a two year old. Especially worms. We have a wonderfully landscaped garden plot in front of our new house, but since the home was vacant for nearly a year it had fallen into some manner of disrepair. With the beautiful weather about to come to an end 
we decided we needed to get a handle on the encroaching grasses and weeds before the coming rains gave them a power boost, so the three of us spent the evening in the garden: Cortney weeded, Jon cleaned up after her, and Calvin pointed out as many bugs as he could find ("worm, more worms, more worms," "spider, more spiders, more spiders," "tato bug, more bugs, more tatoes"). He also talked a lot about how prickly the rose and fir bushes are ("ouch," "picky," "no no no don't touch picky ouch"). And in case you were wondering, no he's never quiet at home. Never. Unless he's in trouble.
We are celebrating this momentous occasion with a county wide weather advisory, complete with several 
inches of snow expected over the next 48 hours. We're doing our best to hope for rain instead, since we are also celebrating by closing on, and moving into, our new house during the same time span. Perhaps a more appropriate celebration (of the season turning) would have been the near 60 degree weather we enjoyed at this time last week, topped off with the relaxing walk we took through our neighborhood. At the time we'd been assuming there would be more of those, 
but with the recent weather changes and the move looming large before us, the odds aren't for it. The nature in our neighborhood is likely to be the one thing we miss after we leave: the rabbits, muskrats, foxes, coyotes, ducks, cranes, geese, and abundant avifauna. There is a small pond in our new neighborhood, and we border a large expanse of farmland where we are sure to see deer at the right time of day or year, but we had come to look forward to our nightly walks when we visited with the ducks and the muskrats in the well developed (drainage) waterways of our large neighborhood planting. We plan to make at least one trip back this way to visit the baby ducks after the first hatching of the year.
We have a lot of ducks that hang out in the ponds (read: drainage ditches) in our neighborhood and Calvin's day just isn't the same if he doesn't get to go say hi to them. It's really a good time, because some people, ourselves not included, clearly feed these guys and they are more than happy to waddle within touching range as we stroller on up. For some reason, 
however, they aren't so happy to stay that close when Calvin is no longer restrained in the stroller, a fact that confuses and frustrates the poor child to no end. The dogs and cats let him pet them, why not the ducks? Come on!
