Domestic: a warm, apple pie or a freshly ironed shirt? A nicely decorated room or a freshly scrubbed bathroom? What does domestic look like to you? What are the things that make you feel domestic?

I told Karina yesterday that I much prefer the “fun” side of domestic: the decorating, the baking, the family activities. I get bored with the “everyday” domestic of laundry and dishes and mopping. The two are part & parcel and I embrace them fully, but I much prefer things like this or this over things like this or this.

Still, even with all this “domestic abundance” floating around as possible solutions to this week’s Popinjay photo challenge, I was at a bit of a loss as to what to photograph. What shall I choose to encompass “domestic” as I see it? I think I may surprise you…

You’ve probably heard the verse,

“Go to the ant, you sluggard! Consider her ways and be wise,
Which, having no captain, Overseer or ruler,
Provides her supplies in the summer, And gathers her food in the harvest.” (Proverbs 6:6-8)

This passage is a well known and excellent analogy for a good work ethic, in any situation, including homemaking. The ant, always busy, never idle, working quickly, making wise decisions.. has an incredible work ethic, don’t you think?

But what about the spider? What a diligent and excellent homemaker! Every strand of every web has been perfectly placed exactly where she wants it. The strands run together and look seemingly the same, the same as routine domestic days get marked off the calendar. Each strand is different though, unique in it’s placement, as each day bring it’s unique experiences. What if the spider suddenly decided she was tired of building webs? How would she catch her food? Where would she build her egg sack? (What kind of spider would she be then?) But she never does. The spider does what needs to be done, when it needs to be done. She works quickly. She works tirelessly. She creates much beauty. She does much hard work. And it’s the whole thing, the big picture, every strand and every fly that makes her what she is. It’s the whole package.

I have much to learn from the spider. Even though I personally am very CREEPED. OUT. by her presence I can at least admire her work ethic and diligence and appreciate her as a homemaker — from a distance. (So long as she’s not making her home IN MINE.)

My apologies, Michelle, for using spiders two weeks in a row!! At least this one was just the web. ; ) For more Popinjay, visit Michelle!!

A hard winter makes for a smaller insect population in the summer, or so the old adage says… HA! says I. HA!
This past winter was a GOOD COLD WINTER. Well, as far as Texans can HAVE good cold winter. We had more snow than we’ve seen in years, and yet here we are creepy crawling with bugs all over! So much for the old saying.

At first I thought that I was simply noticing more bugs, paying more attention thanks to my little boy who is really into bugs right now. But as we have found more and more and MORE bugs inside our house and on our back porch I started thinking: “This isn’t normal!” And guess what? It’s not.

We’re having a bug surge this summer.

Oh, goody.

We have seen more grasshoppers than I care to count. They. Are. Everywhere. It makes me think of the plague of locusts, just sayin. Fortunately, grasshoppers don’t sting or bite. Though they CAN be quite annoying when one finds its way into your adjoining master bath and SINGS. ALL. NIGHT. LONG. Ask me how I know.

We have found (and killed) 7, or 8, or 9 (I’ve lost track) wolf spiders in our house this year. In the previous 5 years we’ve been here, we may have found 2 or 3? At the most. Normally the rule is “Outside: You’re not my problem; Inside: You’re toast.” This year I’ve even squashed a few on the back porch. I figure, there’s obviously plenty. And the back porch is too close to “In the house.” The creepiest one –aside from the one on my bed IN MY BLANKETS– was a few nights ago when I saw something like this (see video below) on the back porch, only it was dark and the yellow porch light didn’t illuminate it too well. It just looked like a funny looking spider until I squished it — and hundreds of teeny spiders started WOOSHING away from the dead Mommy spider and spreading out across my porch. EEEP!!!

WARNING: This video may give you the heebiejeebies!!!

SHE HELD IT! SHE TOUCHED IT! EEEEEP!!!! OH MY GOODNESS!!

Ok, I’m better now. Except I keep feeling like things are crawling on me..

SCORPIONS. Need I say more? I’m so creeped out by scorpions I really just want to move on. We’ve killed at least half a dozen inside and outside the house. STILL…that’s not our highest scorpion record. Once a few years ago, with a sudden rash of rain storms chasing bugs inside in the middle of the summer, we found five in our house in a week! That’s one record I don’t want to beat.

Flies. Maggots. No pictures of maggots for you. I will spare you. The beginning of our summer was AWFUL with flies and we had a horrible fly/maggot problem in our kitchen. I had to take my trash out Every. Single. Day. Or they’d lay eggs in the trash can (even with hardly any food trash in it!) and two days later we’d have maggots crawling across the floor in our kitchen. I wanted to cry. Believe it or not, a trash can with a lid and a sticky mouse trap got that problem under control. The flies would land on top of the lid and get stuck to the sticky trap. Yay for sticky traps!

You probably already know that we have found (and tried to feed and grow) several caterpillars this summer. But what you may not know is that before this summer, I never really noticed any! I was amazed when we went to my Mother-In-Law’s house and saw this sunflower “weed” COVERED in tiny caterpillars. On top of and under every huge leaf, devouring the entire thing! I don’t know if they were going to be butterflies or moths, but I bet when they all grew up she had a ton of one or the other buzzing around her yard.

Beetles? Okay, the beetles are new. We just saw these. Maybe I can’t include them because I haven’t seen TONS and TONS. But I’ve never seen any in our yard before. And then I find two on the porch. So that counts, right?

Oh my word the dragonflies! They have always been big swarmers on summer evenings, but the air above our yard has just been FULL of them every sunset. They circle and circle around. One flew in our house and I tried to shoo it back out, but it landed between our washer and the wall! I finally did get it to crawl onto the broom and I released it outside. What? It’s a dragonfly, it doesn’t harm anything right?

We have also had wasps, bees, yellow jackets and muddobbers coming out of our ears. And when it rains: mosquitos. And also, ants. Good grief.

The only “good” thing that comes out of our bug surge is that we get to look things up and learn about them. My little boy is FASCINATED by the grasshoppers and dragonflies. I’m just ready for the wasps, scorpions and spiders to go away. Because this? This is definitely not normal!

This week’s Popinjay photo prompt was “Abnormal.” I have several! For more Abnormal, visit Michelle. No, wait, that didn’t sound right….

A little late but what else is new? I’ve been missing out on Popinjay the last few weeks so hey, at least I’m getting it up – right? =P

This week’s Popinjay photo prompt is “Dainty.” I had planned on taking a picture of the roses my husband bought me for our anniversary on Sunday. But they were left at my mother-in-law’s house until yesterday and then I noticed that a lot of other people had the flower idea, too. ;0)

And then this flew in our school room today:

THAT.. Is a Red-tailed Specter Moth.

Tiny little thing. Drama Queen gingerly picked it up and tried to put it back out the door, though it flew back in and took up permanent residence on our school room wall. Her hand was all shiny and shimmery with pale silvery sparkles.

Talk about dainty. You have to be so careful not to hurt their wings!

Their pattern, which is difficult to distinguish can be clearly seen in the images at Bug Guide. Aren’t they beautiful?

You can link up your own “dainty” image to Popinjay at michellependergrass.com. =)

If you happen to read my blog AND follow me on Twitter AND are privy to my private facebook page, you would notice that I’ve been talking a lot about bugs lately. We are in, what I like to call,.. BUG SEASON.

Translation: We are up to our ears in bugs.

We have good bugs, bad bugs, small bugs, big bugs, pretty bugs, ugly bugs… bugs, bugs, bugs.

And as a general rule: I don’t really like bugs.

But some of them are actually pretty cool! With some of our recent outside (and inside) discoveries, the kids and I have been online looking and learning about some of the bugs in our yard. It’s like “extra credit” for homeschool science.

With all our looking and learning, we’ve found a few (or 13, ya know Thursday Thirteen) really cool bug websites. Here ya go:

Thursday 13: The Good, The Bugs & The Ugly!!

1. Butterflies and Moths of North America
2. How to Make a Caterpillar House
3. Discover Life (Identification for plants AND bugs!)
4. Bug Guide
5. What’s that bug?
6. BugInfo.com
7. Free Spider Identification Chart (dangerous and poisonous spider pictures, first aid for bites, color poster from termite.com)
8. All about spiders at KidZone
9. Common North American Spiders
10. Pest Identification at Terminix.com
11. Ticks in Texas (sorry, you’ll have to go look up your own state.) =P
12. Scorpion Facts at Animal Planet
13. Bugs and Invertebrates (not ALL bugs, but ya know, worms and stuff) at National Geographic

Interesting things I have learned in the last couple weeks:

~Some moths don’t have a mouth. At all. They don’t eat! They live off stores of fat from their caterpillar days, live a week or so, lay eggs like crazy, and then they die.

~Female non-eating moths are too busy laying eggs to be attracted to porch lights – those would be the guys: “OOH, BRIGHT LIGHT!!”

~Scorpions with more potent (a.k.a. deadly) venom have bigger thicker tails and smaller, thinner claws.

~Scorpions with weaker (it’ll HURT but not KILL ya) venom have bigger claws because they can’t rely only on their venom and will have to use their claws to grapple their prey. GOOD TO KNOW.

~Moths spins cocoons, butterflies make a chrysalis (I can’t think about either of those things without images from Cocoon and Silence of the Lambs popping into my head..I’ve been warped..)

~Caterpillars hibernate over winter!

~Wolf spiders don’t spin webs – they hunt for prey. *shudder*

~A large percentage of caterpillars found “in the wild” have parasites which aren’t harmful to humans but fatal to caterpillars.

~Ticks are carriers for more than Lyme Disease and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, they also transmit tularemia and babesiosis and all four of these are carried by ticks in our part of the state!

~Want to know if a “Daddy Long Legs” is a spider or not? If it’s a Pholcidae (also known as Cellar Spider) then YES. If it is an Opiliones (a.k.a Harvestmen) .. then NO. So now you know.

~Also, apparently some people call Crane Flies as “Daddy Long Legs”.. but why? That’s not a Daddy Long Legs, I’ll have you know it’s a “Mosquito Eater.”

Wasn’t that fun? Now you know all kinds of things you may or may not have wanted to know about BUGS.

This bug post “lovingly” dedicated to our caterpillar for 2 days, Fuzz, who apparently died of parasites and didn’t live to become a non-feeding Arctiidae moth.

On the plus side, we now have a caterpillar/ladybug/otherbug house we can use to gently observe and then release God’s mysterious creatures. (But not spiders. Or scorpions. Or ticks. Just sayin’.)

Do you KNOW how hard it is to to take a picture of a butterfly?

The fields around our house are flitting with dozens of butterflies this time of year.. oranges, yellows, whites..

Of course there are Monarchs, too. My favorite are the black butterflies, the Pipevine Swallowtails.

Yesterday, I was moved by the number of butterflies in our yard so I tried to follow the biggest one around and capture a few shots — I didn’t know how many pictures I was going to have to try to take to finally “catch” him! I finally did, the two below turned out the best:

I believe these are Variegated Fritillary butterflies, or Euptoieta Claudia. Even it’s scientific name sounds beautiful! These pretty little butterflies can be found all over nearly the entire state of Texas. You should check out the pictures on that link (the ones taken by people who actually know what they are doing..) it’s a very beautiful little creature.

Recently the kids and I have been learning a bit about butterflies, and we found a ton of videos on YouTube showing caterpillars making their chrysalis and the butterfly emerging from it. AMAZING.

These two were my favorite, because they were so short!! The kids enjoyed it, but we learned a lot, too. (Like butterfly caterpillars make a chrysalis and moth caterpillars spin a cocoon. I did not know that!) We noticed it while we were watching videos so we looked it up and yup, it’s true.

One thing that struck me as I walked among the butterflies yesterday, is how often I overlook them. I’m sure there weren’t any more in the yard yesterday than there were the day before! I’m just too busy to stop and pay attention. I am…too busy.

As you’re out and about today, I wonder if you’ll see any butterflies?

This post has been happily submitted to Sweet Shot Tuesday at Life With My 3 Boybarians. Life is sweet – go take a taste.