Lizzy, naturalist

I’m often a bit torn when it comes to Lizzy and gender issues. On one hand, I love, love, love having a sweet, soft little girl who likes to wear dresses (sometimes) and play with dolls and tends to nurture things as opposed to being bent on destroying them.
On the flip side, she doesn’t seem to like trying to climb things much – which used to be cool (toddler stage), but now seems a bit whiny – and she does silly things sometimes, such as say, “Ick!” or "Ewwww!" when I’m reading the Pokey Little Puppy to her at night and the puppy encounters things like lizards, spiders and grasshoppers going up the hill or down the other side.

So I was quite pleased Monday night when we arrived home from work and day care, and we found a fuzzy little caterpillar on our garage door. Lizzy wanted to know if she could touch it. “Of course you can!” I said, telling the persistent inner Mommy voice that, no, this would not be that type of caterpillar I heard about one time with poisonous spiky hair on its back. She wanted me to pick it up first. So I did. Then she did! Then she carried it around, letting the little guy crawl all over her arms and shirt, and pleaded with us to let her ‘keep it.’ Matt and I successfully argued that 1) there were about 30 million identical caterpillars within a square acre of this one, and 2) it would probably die if we took it inside. So she put it down on the deck railing in the backyard, and wished it goodnight as dusk fell.

On the way home on Tuesday night, Lizzy said, “Will my caterpillar still be on the deck in the backyard?” I said, “Well, we can check!” and whispered a furtive prayer that we’d be able to find one of those 30 million fuzzy little guys somewhere around when we got home. Sure enough, we found three on our driveway within the first, oh, nine seconds of arrival. Lizzy delightedly proclaimed that the most active was her little friend from the preceding night. She left that one outside without too much of a struggle, but periodically throughout the evening said, “I need a pet. I need a pet.” Which I find hilarious, because Lizzy and I are basically leaning on Matt to “let” us have both a couple of cats AND a baby right now. Poor guy!

To keep our still-in-residence attic squirrels in good company (I guess), a couple of bluejays moved into our backyard about a month or so ago. We saw them making a nest on the play equipment we inherited with the house one Saturday morning.
Matt’s dad was visiting, and pointed out that we’d better get rid of that nest before the mommy bird laid eggs in it and they decided that the entire backyard was their territory. They’re rather notoriously bad sharers, I hear. And they took off for a week or two, leaving us ample opportunity to do so. But I just couldn’t. Have you ever seen a nest up close? It is a thing of amazing, inspirational beauty. At least, this one is. It’s got lovely little twigs cleverly interwoven that trail artistically down the side of the platform a bit. And a perfectly round inner bowl of what looks like dried mud. It’s absolutely astonishing, that these birds can throw that thing together in a few hours. If it wasn’t found in nature, I’d visit a museum to see it.

A week or two ago, they returned. And laid six little brown-and-yellow-speckled eggs. The mama (I assume) looks at us defensively whenever we go on the back deck, and she took off for a treetop when Lizzy wanted to go bounce on the trampoline on Saturday. Then mama came back. I hope the eggs weren’t harmed by her forced departure.

We also appear to have not just one, but two, bunnies who seem to live under a bush alongside our fence! I saw one brown little bunny with a white puff of cotton tail the first time we sneaked into the backyard to check out the (vacant) house. And we’ve seen him a bunch of times since. He’s totally a resident. But we’d never seen his friend until a couple of days ago. I joked to Matt that that particular amenity hadn’t been listed with the property. It’s such fun for Lizzy to be able to see these little guys.

Though, having said all that, I’d still like to kill me some squirrels. (joking, wildlife management folks -- only fantasizing. Er, joking.) But I’ll settle for getting them out of the attic – and keeping them out.