We’ve had a house guest for a week or so, and today we finally met them!

The other weekend, Luna picked me a most precious gift, a chrysalis for a monarch caterpillar we had in the garden…  oh she couldn’t help herself, and so we carefully tied it onto a stick and gave it to our David to take of.

This weekend, Luna came to me exclaiming, “The butterfly has hatched!” how exciting, I brought David down and set them on the table while I figured out how best to get the butterfly safely outside!

She started flexing those stunning wings…

Luna was very keen to have her on her hand to take outside, but it was just a bit too tickly… and I helped out.

She spent some time in our peach tree, before leaving.

How about this for a view in the morning?  Beautiful Kawau Bay.

Fun times at nana’s place, Luna and Blake put together this large nest on the back deck, I even got to try  it out myself while Blake snoozed.

Mum’s garden is a bit of a wild one, some veges and herbs self-seeding about the place (cat nip of course).  Some older trees, and plenty of flowers ready to be picked, and nana doesn’t mind a bit…  Quite a lot to explore if you’re small and like flowers and insects and stuff.

Slaters.

Blake loves bugs on him, even reaching out his hand for airplanes to land on.

And skinks!  Are there skinks?  Absolutely everywhere, I managed to catch a few so we could have some close looks, this little one was quite content to look at us as much as we were keen on checking him out.

The girls can’t resist getting into the garden when we are away from home.

Tree huggers!

Loving Autumn…

Can’t say I’m EVER so well co-ordinated with my garden as these girls are…

A pumpkin!  Or it’s probably actually a squash!

I love autumn, and pumpkins are so very autumn.  The best ones are those that come up by accident, out of garden compost…  this one is in the soon to be garlic bed.  If there’s room.

Ramona’s pretty excited too.

Isobel and Iris.

It’s the creek!  Says Luna.

We like simple toys here, and it’s not original, but we had a few logs lying around in the back yard after taking out some undesirable trees (so these babies are not made from lovely friendly willow or anything..) and we had had a few rainy days, so I suggested we make some new toys…

Simple is definitely best for kids to really play.  We just cut the logs in short lengths, maybe between 20 -80 mm, Rob cut a few ‘half’ logs.  These are great for making trucks!

Old Austin was not that keen on it all, I pulled out some stones, and the pine cones.

I also enjoyed setting up some imaginary worlds…

I pulled out the felt pieces, which are often land or water for plastic animals…

Good fun!

How could she resist?

A beautiful sunny morning, some of the purplest of purple hydrangeas in the world…

Pretty pretty, and Isobel had to join in too…

Loving it!

The day the sun came out!

Got a few nice snaps of the girls looking at some delicate fungi on our last day in Katikati…

Ramona and Audrey..  ”These are so ephemeral are they not?”

“Why, yes!”

“Wohoo!  Sunshine!”

“Look at these ones, tiny aren’t they?”

From us all, “Good bye Katikati, hello sunny Auckland!”

Plenty of flowers in the garden at the moment.

Luna picked these flowers and set them on the table.

This was the big thing that happened over the weekend.  As soon as I saw this tree, I knew it would make a good tree house!

it just needed to be freed from the jasmine and moth plant that were strangling it and our lovely Carla came and gave it a good prune. Really simple to construct, though it took a few hours, we had a solid wood slice as a platform, loads of lengths of logs in various thicknesses.  Rob cut a few posts from the logs which we settled the platform on, then added the handhold and banister kind of logs around locking them in on each other and nailing them in place.  We made some ladder rungs in places too.

All that needed to be done was bringing the wood (that came from a couple of wooly nightshade trees I chopped down) and some really long nails together.

We all love it!  I whipped up some flags and we strung them up, with a piece of red fabric as a sun shade, and Luna starts singing ‘happy birthday’ sweet.

I love molluscs.  I love really small ones, like the juveniles that wash up in the fine sand on some beaches and then there are the just plain TINY ones that go unseen as we busily get on with the big stuff.  So it was a bonus to discover these little beauties when I brought home a big bunch of Italian parsley from my mums place, I’ve seen them around before and I don’t know what they are – yet!