Confessions of a Grandma

Oh, dear. My grand son drew this picture while he was here last week: Clearly, it is the tick I tweezed off his little chest. And I totally recognize the dots as bacteria from his favored book, The Gas We Pass: The Story of Farts. Also, we had a conversation a couple of times about the feelers/antennae on bugs. I am worried that this is a sign of trauma to his sensitive nature.

A while ago, I noted that I had not been able to identify this flower.  Two readers offered guesses.  Linda thought it was chionodoxa   and Tabor suggested Scilla siberica.  I looked them both up--very similar plants.  Some botanists do not even acknowledge them as a separate genus, although others do.  What cannot be seen in the pictures (I am not much of a photographer) is that the stamens in the plants that I saw are flattened and form a tube.  That suggests that they are chionodoxa, also called "Glory-of-the-snow."  I am sure that they escaped from a nearby garden.  Some may just escape from the roadside and into my garden. Walking in the woods and fields is now officially over for me.  I pulled a tick off my grandson's chest during a bath after a walk in the field behind our house and Mike pulled one off his own leg.  I'm sure that I got to Dane's quickly, but Mike's bite spread over his whole inner thigh. ...