Birds and Bugs

So I go to see my sister Jenna one day, and she hands me a caterpillar in a jar.  "Gee, thanks, you shouldn't have," I thought.

But she was all excited, she found it in her garden on some dill, and researched it on line so I would know how to take care of it. 

http://www.butterfliesandmoths.org/species/Papilio-polyxenes

She thought Dyleva would get a kick out of watching it grow and change.   

She was right.  I showed it to the niños and Dylan went off.  "First, mommy he goes in a shell and then after a lot of days he will come out and one day he will be a butterfly.  We had one at Doodlebugs and it took a lot of days."

So I spent a lot of time making this caterpillar happy, including a trip to the grocery store, to find the correct plant for this thing to eat.  Seriously.  Sorry, I don't grow dill.

The next day, he didn't move, I thought I had already starved him to death, but apparently was conserving energy to cocoon. 



We went camping.  With my luck the darn thing would come out while we were gone, so I left some oranges in the bottom of the pavillion, just in case.


Sure enough.  The first thing Eva spotted was the beautiful butterfly that emerged while we were camping!  She was so excited.  It was beautiful.   
 


And the birds.

We have beautiful flowers that Jeff buys every year to decorate our patio.

This year a robin decided to build a nest in one of them, and proceed to lay eggs.  I have been obsessed and fascinated, and paranoid that anyone that came in contact with them would disrupt their natural cycle. 

Dyleva has also been facinated by the progression of the baby birds' life cycle.

We were ecstatic the day, the eggs hatched.The babies were little pink blobs.  But little by little, their little heads would peak up to look for Mama bird.

One day we looked in and there were soft gray feathers covering the little pink blobs. 

Mama bird was not shy.  She would fly in when we were right in front of the nest. Several times a day.   And then one day, right before we left for the beach, Eva ran into the house, yelling for me. 

"Mommy!  The bird just jumped out of the nest!"


By the time I got out there, they had already moved to the next yard.  The babies sat in the grass, with the Mommy and Daddy birds up in the tree, waiting for them to fly.




Mama bird and Papa bird in the tree waiting for Little one

 

We watched them for a while, and then we moved on. 

We have empty nest syndrome.