Random Sunday Butterfly
I’m going to go babysit my brother’s new baby for the first time today! Although technically since he’s 6 months old now, he’s not all that new. So expect the random pictures, I promised, plus new and updated baby pictures, throughout the day as I add this new thing into my Sunday of football, work, and posting. Our dinner was very nice except we forgot that they had the lighting/parade/Christmas thing downtown (in Chicago–in case you want to look it up) and we got caught in a million people’s attendance and traffic. No joke. I heard the news last night, they said one million people were estimated to have attended. If I research and confirm this factoid, I will let you know. But I probably won’t. I won’t research. I won’t confirm. Or refute. Heck, I probably won’t even ever speak of it again. If you want to keep it real, feel free to comment with the correct number and facts, otherwise, let’s just all agree we were downtown with a million other people last night and leave it at that! I will post pictures of anything food/fun related the kids took as soon as they send it to me. I am also planning on a lot less words to go with the rest of the posts I put up here today. Consider this all the reading you need to do for the day! I have to shower and gather my things. Time is a ticking. The kids are going to their dad’s and I think the BF is staying home. It’s individual Sunday. That can totally be our new thing! Later.
More Random Wild Life. For My Mom.
Chipmunks.
Rabbits. This is the mom I believe. She looks kind of beat.
Those ears kill me. They are gigantic. Is this technically a “hare”? Or a jackrabbit? Or just a plain, old, midwest rabbit? Probably doesn’t matter. I have a few more:
This was before babies. She (?) would be sitting out there in the rocks every day when we would leave and sometimes when we would come home. I can only assume it was a nice warm spot by the house. Our walls are literally brick and drywall thin. And our crappy metal windows basically blow air in all year round. It only makes sense that the hot air was coming through just as well. On the upside, I tell my family that we will never die of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning. Too many leaks in the infrastructure. One less thing ya know?
The nest of babies. We found it by mistake. The one closest to the front obviously did not make it. But the other two were squirming around. There may have been three at one time but we have only seen two in the yard on a regular basis. Here’s one:
Isn’t that precious?
This is like one of those “find-the-rabbit-in-this-picture” pictures. Highlights magazine. Or am I the only one out here old enough to know about this?
Frog.
Another frog.
Let’s keep working this water theme. Ducks. And baby ducks.
Mom and dad ducks.
City ducks. Chicago Lock Ducks. That’s prob a good name for some kind of team. The Chicago Lock Ducks! Swimming into stadiums near you! Eh. Let’s just post the pics.
To wrap up this very long segment, I will end with the fish and turtles inside of our house. The time is ticking away and my daughter wants to go out. Here is the old stuff and current stuff. Oscars, from young to old. Then the turtles, in order of growth.
When you come up to the tank, they swim to the glass to see you. So friendly like. We had 4. Now we only have 2. Sad. What’s really sad is that we are kind of waiting for the other two, to, ummm, perish, if you will. They live forever and you can’t put anything new into the tank with them because they will attack and kill it. Not all, Great White shark attack killing, or gnashing teeth piranha swarming blood bath, no, they just head butt and try to clamp down with their giant mouths and take pieces out of the other fish until the poor sucker cowers into a corner, sinks to the bottom of the tank and die. Nice fish huh?
Awwwww. So cute.
Turtle as art. This is how they look now.
All awkward and on top of each other. Their tank is really too small now.
Just as an extra note to anyone that has turtles and a turtle tank that gets really dirty: Spend the 8 dollars on this moss ball thing. It really works. It looks ridiculous, and you are basically paying for something you could scoop out of a creek at the Forest Preserve, but hey, nature isn’t always pretty.
So there ya go mom! I saved all the squirrel pictures and the skulking black cat that prowls around our backyard for their own separate posts. And there is A LOT. The squirrels we have in our yard are very crazy, so they need their own special column here. And the cat is just a cat, but I have various pictures of it doing predator-like things that I feel make it worthy of its own posting too. Plus, this is like 3 pages long. It’s enough. And I found more birds and flowers. And inanimate animals. I really like taking pictures of statues and fake animals too apparently. It’s a disease. It’s also 85 degrees and Saturday afternoon, and my day off. I need to get up out of this house and hit the streets. There is shopping to be shopped, dinner to be gotten, and drinks to be drank. Everyone have a safe night and I will post more. Later.
Raccoon In A Can.
Just going to do this now, and move on with my life! We did not harm the creature. We rolled the can to the grass. Laid it down very slow and gently and opened the lid. We gave the can a little nudge and the raccoon ran out scared and confused while we just stood there waiting for it to pick a direction. End of story. Again, have a great day all!
Classic Bunny Pose. Right Before We Fed Him To Our New Pet, The Snake.
Just kidding. However, we do actually have 2 little baby bunnies that seemed to survive the nest we found a few weeks back. Looked like 4 inside, but we only see 2 every day now. Oh? You don’t want to hear about these bunnies? What happened to the snake? Well, I’ll tell ya.
The snake survived fine, overnight, in the pillowcase, the first night into Sunday. We had discussions with family about who to call, what to do, where the snake should go, blah blah blah. We had some nature preserve ideas, natural habitat locations, and I did more research on the internet to find a decent solution we could all live with. We had a pretty good plan in place, but when we woke up Monday morning, it seemed that nature was going to decide for us. The pillowcase was wet, but only in a certain spot, as if something tried to attack it and either the snake was now dead, or it defended itself and released liquids of some defensive sort. I don’t really know enough so I thought, dead. I got gloves, cause, ewww, and when I picked up the bag to untie the cord the snake was rattling and angry. But alive. So we let it out nice and slow like they say to, and it calmed right down. I was able to hold it and inspect it and it looked OK. But, it definitely could not stay in a pillowcase, inside of a plastic tub, in a backyard, for anymore days or nights. Based on more research and a few phone calls, the best course was to let it go in its closest natural habitat. The snake is one of our Illinois snakes, and it is considered mostly passive as far as wild snakes go. And they move around at night in the summer. So, maybe it just got really lost. We have, well, let me say, we had, a wild, wooded area right at the end of our block-set mere weeks ago. But after several episodes of flooding, the town, or county, or whoever, leveled all the trees, bushes, grass, etc., and created a retention/detention pond-type area. It was quite dense and wild. It had coyotes. We saw them over the winter. At any rate, they’re all gone now. The land is flat and I’m sure the animals that didn’t get killed outright, moved themselves out asap. And maybe our little friend finally worked her way over to our backyard looking for shelter. Or she was just passing through and just wasn’t fast enough. OR. She’s been hanging out in our backyard for god knows how long because of all the wood we had piled around and since we moved some of it in our clean-up attempt she had to move too, but we just never saw her until the other day. Eck. We could have been sitting and standing near her for days. Or weeks. Eeesh. Let’s not think about that though. Let’s think about this instead: The nice thing about living in the suburbs is we live very close to, “the end of the suburbs”, which is basically open land and fields and forest preserves. We picked the best one that had everything: Prairie-like land, woods, marshy swamp area, and water. And not visited or populated by many people. Some areas see lots of traffic, the one we picked has very little, in general and by comparison. We drove over there Monday, nice and early. No people. took a walk deep into the back, a nicely wooded and flat area, where the secondary, smaller pond is, and let her go along the tree line. It’s a good spot. Lots of space for a young snake. (We have been thinking juvenile, totally based on color and patches, via the internet again. I could be completely wrong of course. Male. Old. Dying. Who knows.) Anyway this is her new home:
We let her out of the pillowcase, onto the ground, behind where we took the picture. Thick woods, away from the roads or parking areas, with that view across. She layed for a minute in the grass and the sun. And slowly slid into the trees. Then she was gone.
Happy Father’s Day!
Happy Father’s Day to all the daddies. Past, present, future. By blood or by life. If you are taking care of the kids every day, you are a daddy! Keep on truckin’. That’s for my dad. Old school. Gone but not forgotten. (Sorry little brother, you weren’t born yet in these pics!)
Look at that old time stroller! It’s like a shopping cart for babies. My brother, who just became a daddy for the first time, and the last of all us kids to have kids, is rockin’ it new school with all the hip gear. And a baby backpack. Show me the love:
WARNING: The picture below my be unsuitable for children. And adults. It contains a gesture that may be considered offensive. Please proceed with caution.
My brother is still not fully embracing the whole “baby thing”. Or is he? We’ve seen him pushing the baby, changing the baby, feeding the baby, carrying all the babies stuff in a snazzy backpack, (see above), so I don’t know. He’s a rock. He’s an island. But this is a man who knows how to protect the important things in life. Last picture. Hooch and the baby. I think his son is one finger away from looking exactly like him. Have a very, very, happy Father’s Day!
And Now, The Baby!
I went with “smiling” baby. It’s been a week, but I finally made it over to the new baby house. And I only took a few pictures. I know. I was having an off day I guess. It’s hard to take pictures though, while you are holding the baby, so there is that. I tried though.
And since this is pretty much all the baby does right now, I didn’t stay long either. I told my brother to call me when his boring kid starts doing stuff and I’ll come back over. I think he is still convinced (hoping) that this is how puppies look before they start growing fur and a tail. I’m going to let one of my sisters break the human news to him. But, he sure is cute isn’t he?! Later.
just shy of pretty 