Beautiful day, la la

We had a nice, quiet, slow morning at the butterfly garden.

Actually, there was lots of running around, gobbling of large amounts of Cheerios, and fussing and whining, but I didn't do any of it.

The funny thing was that the fussing and whining came in the middle. I kept trying to pick one last weed, one last weed, and Cloud kept trying to prevent me from doing so. Finally I gave up and strolled him back to the car.

As soon as we got there, he turned around and tried to lead me back.

We're finding a mass infestation of swallow wort around the garden plots. I took a picture, but I currently don't have the camera so I can't upload it. Here, let me draw one for you.









It's very small right now. The Audubon guy is going to spray it with Roundup sometime when we're not around. In the meantime, I'm picking off those little heads.

Eventually it will look like this:


We hope to prevent that from happening. But it's invasive and fast-growing and it has a spaghetti-like root base that's impossible to remove. Also, it kills monarch butterflies. Swallow wort is related to milkweed, and it smells just as bad, but monarch caterpillars can't subsist on it.

Of all the rotten things to have in a butterfly garden, this is the worst.

I'm also pulling up a lot of grass, which is not harmful to butterflies, but grass air-pollinates so it doesn't produce any nectar.

(That's why so many people get grass allergies.)

Remember my previous post, in which AwesomeCloud suffered various small mishaps throughout the day? That's becoming a pattern now. There are mashed finger incidents and stubbed toe incidents and dropped food incidents and other unpleasant surprise incidents.

I had a scone and I was going to split it with him when I noticed it had mold. "Ew! Ewwy!" I said dramatically and I threw it across the Audubon parking lot. AwesomeCloud gave me THE MOST HORRIFIED LOOK, as if he'd just watched me behead the cat. Actually, he can't eat a cat. Anyway, it was a genuine "you don't love me and also you're dangerously crazy" look.

And then he didn't cry... quite. Maybe a little.

Someday that whole scene will make sense to him. For now, though, Mama has fallen off her rocker and the world is a twisted, cruel, unforgiving place.

Then we went to the store and got a chicken salad sandwich, which I didn't fling into the dirt, so maybe the world isn't such a bad place after all.