Bye-Bye, Butterflies!

As many of you North Texans have probably noticed, this year brought an influx of Monarch butterflies to our area. Jensen, my little butterfly whisperer, was in absolute heaven. We had so many in our front yard one day that it was seriously like being at the butterfly exhibit at the Botanic Gardens.

There are four in this pic.

And there is one yard in our neighborhood that has these special butterfly-attracting trees...I swear there are probably hundreds of butterflies in that one yard. Jensen routinely asks to go walking to see the butterflies, so we head that way, park our stroller, and watch the butterflies until Charlotte gets bored and insists we move on.

Jensen got this little guy to land on a stick the other day...

Kind of hard to see because Brian took these with his phone, but there is a Monarch on the end of the stick. J was quite pleased with himself!

I got the idea to go cut up some watermelon and set it out for the butterflies to eat...er, I mean drink. Butterflies don't eat. They drink, using their proboscis (thank you, Sesame Street!). It seemed to work at the butterfly exhibit, but it didn't go so great in our front yard. Perhaps this was due to the two toddlers who thought it would be much more hospitable to shove chunks of watermelon in the butterflies' faces (proboscis'?) rather than simply leave it on the plate for them to drink at their leisure.

This next one is my favorite. You can see the butterfly rapidly escaping while Charlotte shoves watermelon at it and Jensen watches.

Unfortunately, the other day we noticed that the butterflies are gone. I guess they've continued their migration to...well, I don't know where they go. Sesame Street didn't cover that part. Bye-bye, butterflies! I guess we'll see you next year!