Shadows of joys to come

I babysat all day today, (Friday). The sun shone through the windows ...

Shadows of Jaya's window art on the curtains.

Mmmm... Boiled egg!

... and Sofia and I went out to explore the garden. There was plenty to see; daffodils, periwinkle and forsythia were in full bloom. So were two dandelions; Sofia picked them to put in a jar for Mommy. (Mommy thought they were just beautiful.) The old pear trees were putting out the first buds.

Budding pear branch

Early pear bud

The buds are not pretty at this stage; they remind me somewhat of the head end of a carnivorous marine worm. (Photo here.) They're even hairy, like the worm. But in a week or so, they'll have opened up into mountains of delicate, snowy blossoms.

The magnolia tree's packaging looks more like a mouse than a bud. A coarse-haired mouse, at that. Or a rough cocoon for a butterfly; a more appropriate metaphor, given the flower that bursts out and unfolds into spectacular fly-away petals.

Grey-haired mouse, with escapee.

First of the opened blooms. And look inside! There's a stowaway.

I found this old "cage" on the ground; all that's left of last year's flowers. I'm not sure what they were. but the new ones are sprouting.

Cage for a ladybug.

This was sprouting, too. (Don't ask; I don't have the faintest idea.)

Emergence!

And I found my first outdoor spiders of the season; a friendly jumping spider that put on a good show for Sofia, and this one:

Juvenile cross spider, with web.

And we brought in, to show Mommy, three pillbugs. Sofia calls them "picklebugs".

While I was away, Laurie went for a walk and brought home three big-cone pine cones for me. "They might have some bugs on them," he said. He knows what I like.

And yes, I found a globular springtail:

Collembola, about 1 mm.

Now that's what I call a proper spring day!

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