While visiting my Dad in Salt Lake last weekend Holly and I were out in the yard. His house sits on about a half acre of property and has quite a few unused outbuildings. While playing baseball under the big box elder trees in the back, we noticed these box elder beetles trying their hardest to reduce the old barn by the garage back to dust. Regardless of the fact that they are supposed to enjoy box elder seeds pods as their preferred food, the paint on the building seems to be mighty tasty! They were swarming all over the building by the thousands. Their red markings make them hard to see as they match the weathered red paint on the building perfectly... so you really don't notice them until you get up close and look down here near the base where the paint has mostly flaked off. I guess they are a pest bug for some folks, but my Dad just thought they were neat when I pointed the swarms out to him.

Holly hasn't spent a lot of time outside where things grow and bugs creep. Las Vegas is a desert afterall, so she was really enchanted with the blue pollen in Aunt Norah's poppies that just began to bloom while we were there. They only last a few days.

She also rediscovered the fact that Grandpa's yard is like "snail central" and spent an happy hour observing her slimey buddies crawling over Grandpa's front steps. On Monday, when we went up Millcreek canyon for the family breakfast, she was at it again with the snails. Even got brave enough to let a few crawl on her.


So of course, she needed help to locate the snails in the long wet grass and my cousin Katie's little 3 year old boys were on the case!

They had quite a collection going, but once the other kids got wind of it, it turned into quite a project. All my young second cousins (and several aunts, uncles and the young first cousins) were recruited to locate snails for her stump throne. She found one that had a bug on it and was all worried for the snail. She thought it might be a parasite and hurt the snail.



"oh no," I told her with an almost straight face, " that's a snail bus. You know, he's hitching a ride on snail public transporation!"

She didn't really buy into this until I got Grandpa and Uncle Cavett to go along with it. :) HAH! Adults do plot!


Isn't is fascinating how kids can find fun under every rock? Sometimes I miss the green lush ALIVE! quality of Salt Lake and Oregon (where I lived for a short time) but then I remember the misery of living in constant RAIN and deep, cold SNOW and bless my 350 days a year of SUN, SUN, SUN!