Making Lemonaide out of Lemons

Last year I worked hard to plant daffodils, striped squills, tulips and so forth. Last year, nearly all of them came up. This year most of them did (some were lost thanks to this insane weather) but were still beautiful.

Our tulips getting ready to bloom.

Pretty maids all in a row.

Sadly, all my daffodils that survived our stupid winter weather by some miracle, are now quickly dying off because the sun is too dang hot! Pretty little daffodils are early spring bloomers, and are not meant for 80 degrees of sunshine for hours. So, a bunch of the flower parts are already crinkling and drying up and we only have a few left to enjoy.
My little neighbor, who is 3 and Henry's one true love (just kiddin, but really, if you saw these 2 you'd just chuckle) in the mornings when we go outside he goes to their window to talk with her, if she's outside he begs to go out, etc..., loves to pick flowers. She picks her mom's flowers (who doesn't seem to care), the buds off low branches on the trees (which her dad tells her not to)

She isn't tall enough to reach this one I don't think, but I didn't have a picture of the other one, so it's our example.










our little purple flowers off our bushes out front (which I get over)

and dandelions (who cares about those anyways) and has edged her way over to my garden too.
I caught her a week ago, and called over to her not to touch our flowers, and to just look because we didn't want them picked. She stopped. All was well. However, yesterday while we were all outside enjoying the weather and company, she came up to me with one of our only little daffodils left (a mini one-for some reason 1 of our bulbs shot up a few mini flowers instead of full sized ones) and handed it to me with a big smile on her face. I did NOT have a smile on my face. I almost cried actually. I love the flowers in spring, and with months of cold, rainy, nasty, depressing weather, they keep me emotionally afloat. They just brighten me up so much. AND, if you've ever planted your own flowers, especially ones that you have to work so hard for, you do not appreciate someone pulling off the pretty parts only for those parts to die shortly thereafter. Seeing as she is only 3, and was trying to be nice, I just kindly told her that I didn't want her to pick my flowers because when you pick them they die. I also put in that I knew she was trying to be nice, but that I wanted our flowers to look pretty in our garden. Her dad had her apologize, and I took my poor little daffodil inside.
I don't know why it made me so emotional, but I just felt so depressed about it. I wanted to keep it pretty for as long as I could at least. Once they are plucked it doesn't last that long sadly. So, here's what I came up with:

And yes, that is one of Jane's cleaned out baby food jars. It won't put the little flower back on it's stem, but at least we can enjoy it for a little while longer in our kitchen. I suppose I aughta keep some more baby food jars around just in case. ;)