Tales from the Pics

This is an iris from a group of iris April gave to me last year. I have sooooo loved all of my irises blooming!



The first group I received from my aunt's neighbor about 3 years ago; they are deep and light purples. The bunch that April gave me are all yellow. I ♥ Irises! They are so delicate looking and I love them.





This came from a funny, but gross, story. Our family went up into the mountains on Memorial Day to hike a bit and take pics of Karen and Josh (like the one below). After hiking and playing in the water a bit, we were all starving, and had brought hot dogs and marshmallows to roast over a campfire. There wasn't a fire ring where we were, so we drove back down the canyon a bit to a park. As we pulled into the parking lot we noticed that there were several cars, so Josh complained that it was going to be too crowded. After looking around, we couldn't see any people though, and the park itself was empty.

I found one area tucked back from the rest where we could have some privacy when the other picnickers got back from their hike. I hopped out of our van and went to make sure it had a fire ring. As I went deeper into the trees I started feeling spider webs on my face and arms, so I stopped, brushed them off, and started looking to see if the webs were occupied or old. As I focused in I realized it wasn't spiders, it was caterpillars. Little caterpillars dangling from silky thread dotted the air. I turned around and went back to the van to tell my family about it and Jared & Josh hopped out of the van to explore, just as they have since they were little. Josh called to me from the picnic table telling me I "had to see this"! So I swam to them, brushing the caterpillars away from my head as I walked and found this sight:



Hundreds and hundreds of little inchworm like caterpillars covered the table. As all were standing still, staring at the little critters, I heard: plink, plink, plink, plink sounding like rain. But it wasn't raining. It took me a couple of seconds to realize that it was the worms falling from the trees. I dashed back to the van and left the boys to explore while I had Steve look for any stow-aways in my hair or on my back. YUCK!

Later we did find individual caterpillars crawling on the boys jeans, and we admired them for awhile, enjoying watching them bring their back feet to their front feet, hunching up their little backs and then stretch out again to crawl away. Inchworms are fascinating that way. Then we smashed them, because no matter how cute they are one at a time, we did *not* want buckets of worms dropping from our trees next year!


Then there is this pic:


This is all of our favorite pic out of all of the pics I took up the canyon. The other's are sweet too, but this one is absolutely wonderful. This one was a combined effort between the three of us. I found the spot, Karen told Josh to take off his ball cap, and Josh said he thought it would look good if they were looking off into the distance. And it worked beautifully.

They are going to be getting their pic taken by Amber's BFF's mom, who has a way better camera than I do and who is a professor of art at a local university. They will also be dressed up, so maybe after seeing her awesome pics they will go with one of those for their invitations instead, but this one is a keeper, just the same.

Have a wonderful day!