Butterfly Boy

We spent a beautiful afternoon at our favorite Nature Center today. They have a butterfly aviary up right now for their yearly butterfly festival - it's such a beautiful thing! Little Man and I spent close to an hour just hanging out and watching.

 

Then this conversation happened:

M:  Hey!  Look at this...can you see his tongue curl up and uncurl into the flower.

Chipmunk:  Mom. (you'll have to imagine the voice of disdain)  That is NOT a tongue.  It's a sboscis.

M:  A sboscis?

C.  (irritated)  YES.  Bees have them too.

M:  A proboscis??

C:  THAT'S WHAT I SAID!   You have to LISTEN.

M:  *somewhat speechless*



Later in the day, I ran in to the most enthusiastic butterfly.  EVER.

Trust

Meet Skinny

This is Skinny.  He's an American Toad.



The Chipmunk's Dad found Skinny underneath the water plate in the front yard. Apparently he got in there to hibernate (with a few of his friends) and then couldn't get out in the spring. He was the only survivor. I don't have a picture from when we first brought him in, but he was so emaciated that you could see through his skin. Poor guy.

The Chipmunk wanted to take care of him by himself, so we did a little research and made him a chart so that he would know exactly what needed to happen every day.



One of the things on his chart is to read or learn a little bit about toads every day. We quickly expanded that to mean amphibians and it's been a fun couple of weeks reading everything we can find!

 Frog Anatomy, anyone?
 


Skinny was renamed today....he's now called Bigger and he'll be going back to his toad habitat in the yard this weekend!

Chipmunk in the next room:  "MOM!!! NEVER FEAR!!!"

 Mom:   "uh-oh, what should I not be afraid of?"

C:  "There will be NO MORE EMERGENCIES!  THE RESCUE BOTS HAVE TAKEN CARE OF ALL OF THE LAVA"

M:  (internal monologue) oh crap.  Are we talking pretend lava?  Does he mean playdoh?  He calls that cherry jello magma, how am I going to get that out of the carpet?  Is he on the carpet or the hardwoods?  Man.......ants.  That stuff is NOT sugar free.  We are going to have SO many ants.

Mom's outside voice:  Hey, that's great!  Thanks rescue bots!  How did they take care of it?  Do they need help cleaning it up?

C:  "MOM!!  They just pretended.  Don't worry."

Four

It was a fabulous day...full of family, friends, and DIRT!!