Max has an obsession with bugs...every little boy does, I'm sure. But there is a line of toys that he's hooked on that he wants everything of...and Grandma even made him a bug-hunter vest (you can see all of his gear here)
Anyways, one day, I was at TJ Maxx and I ran across one of those coveted toys for cheap. It was a butterfly net, and we have a ton of them in our backyard, so I thought he would have a fun time trying to catch them and stick them in this net.
When I got it home and opened it up...there was a coupon inside to send away for some Painted Lady Caterpillars that would turn into butterflies while we watched...
some friends of mind have also done this, so I thought we'd give it a try. Fun!
it was magic!
it only took about a week to get our little vial of caterpillars. I didn't take a picture of them right when we got them, because they weren't moving, and I was afraid they were dead! but they were tiny. This was after a day or so. They finally came out of hibernation mode, and started walking around inside the vial (there were 5). They ate and ate, and got to be huge, compared to what they were before!
Slowly but surely, they migrated their way up to the top of the vial...
I swear, they dropped off their own heads....but that's not scientific fact...and after their heads were off...or their tails, one of the two, they curled the end of their body up just a little, and magically when we were running errands, the chrysalises formed.
4 of the chrysallises hung from the top of the vial, and one was down in the bottom...I don't know if it fell, or if that's just where life happened.
On Monday morning, I painstakingly took the lid off of the vial and attached it to the lid of the butterfly cage with some thread. eek!
This morning, we woke up to 3 butterflies...and 1 more this afternoon! Don't worry, the one of the bottom of the vial was one of the first to emerge!
I was nervous about how long to keep the butterflies in the cage because I knew they needed to get food, so we released the first 4 today...and we're waiting for the last one to "hatch" and we'll let him go, probably tomorrow.
The underside of their wings is not very pretty, but the top looks like a monarch...it was so fun and magical to watch!
Ivy gets her turn to hold one tomorrow (hopefully)!
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