So here is a typical autumn in Houston: It’s hot, at some point the leaves all suddenly turn from green straight to brown, and then they fall off the trees all at once - BOOM! Oh, and maybe if you’re lucky it’s a few degrees cooler, enough of an excuse to pull on a long sleeve shirt for a couple of hours in the evening. That’s about it for fall!
This weekend, though, we discovered a seasonal joy – monarch butterflies, right in our backyard. At least 15-20 of them at a time, and they’ve been here for at least a week, sipping their fill in our butterfly garden we’ve grown behind the garage for the last two years. Each spring, we clear out the little garden area in back, and the girls plant all the seeds themselves. Somehow, this season things clicked and they discovered our patch - in a big way. With the weather turning so nice we all decided to go and visit with them for a while on Saturday morning. When we approached, they flew up off of their flowers a bit, but just seconds later they ignored us completely and went right back to flower-hopping like we weren’t even there.
Mad and Soph wanted to see if the butterflies would come to them, and so Andy helped them snip off a few flowers to hold onto.
Andy was the first to have a visitor (that hairy arm obviously doesn’t belong to one of the girls).
Soph eventually had some luck too (below), though Maddie didn’t. She was disappointed at first, but got over it and just stood in the middle of the flowers instead.
We must have stuck around for at least half an hour, just watching, smiling, and feeling great. It really felt cool to feel invisible as they went about their business.
Apparently, we’re in the middle of a great big migratory path for the monarchs as they go down to Mexico for the winter months. Hopefully we’ll have more time to enjoy them (I’ve since read that the migration is from September to November) - and with any luck our flowers will hold up for them too! Since we’re incredibly Darwinistic about all of our flower beds (i.e. the strongest will survive despite the fact we basically ignore them) we’re pretty lucky to have been blessed with these beautiful little things.
They’re not the fiery leaves of New England, but at least the color palette’s close!
We did our best this weekend to spend as much time outside as possible. The weather finally turned in our favor, dried up, and was just fantastic, sunny and bright.
While we caught up on some chores, the kids worked hard too at adorning the driveway. When we discovered them it reminded me of cave paintings - though do you think those earliest artists were as cute as ours?
A cow. With a really, really tiny head. But if it’s a cave cow, that’s probabably just right. It’s got an enormous body, which is good because it seems to have been responsible for…
A four-foot tall, very full bottle of MILK. Yum.
This one’s a little hard to see, but if you can figure it out, you know what Maddie’s going as for Halloween. Oink, oink!