Week 29 Theme ~ Get In Close
This is about as close as I can get with my current Canon lens. I would love to purchase a macro. Unfortunately, food, clothes and shelter for the family come first. 🙂
One of the few remaining lilies in my flower garden. The deer decided to let the plants grow just until the flower buds formed and then ate the tops off. Thanks for saving this one for me.
I’ll get back to the “Staycation” posts, but wanted to show some of the photos of Sophia’s most recent friend. Sophia loves animals, birds, bugs, worms and caterpillars. While we are at the cabin, we went for a walk down by the pond to look for baby turtles. Instead of finding a turtle, we brought a big, fat monarch caterpillar back to the cabin. We picked some milkweed to keep him nourished, found a big coffee can as a home to keep him safe and kept a watchful eye on him. The next day he was hanging upside-down in a “J” which is the signal that a monarch caterpillar is going to make a chrysalis. By the next morning our caterpillar was replaced with a jade-colored chrysalis hanging from the top of the coffee can. We did a little research and found that it takes 9-14 days in the chrysalis stage for a butterfly to emerge. We brought him home and kept him warm and dry in Sophia’s room. We watched the chrysalis all week as the jade green color started to look more transparent and the outline of the monarch wings began to show through.
When we left for work and daycare yesterday morning the chrysalis looked like this.
When I came home for lunch it looked like this.
He had emerged sometime during the morning and was waiting for his wings to fill up with fluid before he could take flight. When Sophia got home she spent some time letting him walk on her arm, holding him on her finger and watching him flap his wings practicing before he took flight.
Temperatures were unseasonably cool (low 60’s) and rainy yesterday which likely prevented Sophia’s butterfly friend from taking his flight. We left him in one of our hanging basket plants under the eve of the house overnight. He was still there this morning and was flexing his wings but waiting for better weather to fly away. When we came home for lunch, he was gone.
More boating, beach time, tubing, toad hunting, fireworks and a thunderstorm finished up our time at the cabin.
Dark clouds were in the distance when we took the pontoon down the lake to watch the fireworks. While we were waiting for the show to begin, heat lightning started to light the sky. The heat lightning became more intense, the fireworks started and despite the great display, we realized that we needed to head back to the cabin. In the dark, with lightning flashing to help light our way, Tom drove the pontoon safely, but quickly, back to the cabin. While I took the kids inside, Mike and his parents got the pontoon under the boat cover, put all of the beach items away and made it into the cabin just before the downpour began.
M. Sullivan Photography 