Still February

Most of February has been so mild (in the 40s during the day)
that I have been hoping for spring.
Utah's spring is fickle, though,
and anyway it is still winter,
and the snow the last couple of days has been a vivid reminder.
The snow melts off pretty fast, though,
and meanwhile there are neighbor kids out making snowmen,
and the snow looks pretty when it's fresh.
The birds don't seem to care for it, though.

House Finches by my House

The birds are starting to get active again.
I hear them singing sometimes in the morning.
It makes me remember spring camping trips in previous years
(when I would wake up an hour before dawn
with riotous bird song ringing through the tent walls).
I'd like to go one one of those trips now.
Meanwhile, I enjoy looking for birds around the neighborhood.
This house finch is a delightful resident,
and we also have robins, magpies, sparrows, doves.
Sometimes I can hear them in the morning,
even through regular walls.

The best part of the performance

Sophie liked some of the ballet,
but she was bored by most of it.
However, she had behaved very well
and was quiet and did not even squirm.
So I took her for another treat,
to the BYU creamery for ice cream.
She wanted mint chocolate chip with sprinkles (!)
and more jelly beans.
Oh how she loved those jelly beans--
except the peppermint one:

Taking Sophie's brother for treats has conditioned me to get large sizes, but after Sophie had eaten off the top layer of sprinkles and ice cream, she announced she was done. She probably would have kept on eating jelly beans, however, had I not put the twisty-tie around the bag and tucked them away for later.

Taking Sophie to the Ballet

Here is Sophie in the theater.
She is such a pretty little girl that I find her "camera face" especially annoying--
try as I might, I cannot persuade her not to make these grimaces
(she thinks she's smiling).
So I do better catching candids, if I can.

I rather like the next one.
It reveals a lot of Sophie's character.
The idea was, I took her early to the ballet "Cinderella" playing this last weekend at BYU, and an hour before the performance the ballet cast was in the lobby in costume, ready to greet little girls dressed as princesses (and boys dressed as princes-- I even saw one or two of these, though of course there were far, far more girls.)
I thought Sophie would like to see the pretty ballerina costumes and might agree to have her picture taken with Cinderella or the Fairy Godmother-- all the other little girls were queuing up eagerly.
Not Sophie.
She was too shy. She didn't want to talk to the ballerinas at all, let alone have her picture taken.
So I stopped coaxing and let her sit at the far end of the lobby and eat her jelly beans,
which were her choice of treat from the BYU bookstore candy counter, and which, as you can see, are far more interesting to her than ballerinas.

Sophie did consent to let a kindly fellow-ballet-goer take this picture of the two of us: