Sunday morning was a brilliant day of sunshine and promising warmth, with nothing on the docket. So, I made an executive decision to haul the urchins and the visiting good friend Chad off for a little local berry-picking. Since we still haven't figured out the "best" places to go to pick-our-own produce, I simply googled, took a wild guess, and set off to find a nearby berry patch. We have utterly missed strawberry season(which means, sniff, no strawberry jam this year, sob, sniff) but we found raspberries and blueberries at a little spot about half-an-hour west of town. Enough for raspberry jam and several bags of frozen blueberries, whose destiny is almost certain to be the crowning glory of our homemade pancakes...

Yum.

Chad also found this absolutely fascinating little chrysalis. It looks for all the world like a little gold and silver jewel - extremely beautiful. It also started to jig and jump most mysteriously after we brought it into the car with us for the journey back home.
This morning, as we sat down to breakfast (toast with LOTS of homemade raspberry jam being the centerpiece), the urchins suddenly realized that the chrysalis was now a butterfly!!!! How cool is THAT?
While Chad and I had hoped to have discovered a whole new species of butterfly (and thus enshrine our names in the annals of scientific journals for all time) I am afraid further research reveals it to likely be a Variegated Fritillary butterfly.

I tried to download my pictures to the most awesome website "www.whatsthatbug.com" but couldn't seem to get my computer to obey my commands...so my bestest-googled-guess will have to be the Fritillary. Which I am now struggling to pronounce.

Is it three syllables, like, frit-till-larry? Or more like a two syllable word, like "fri-tillery"? Anybody? Any ideas?