Caterpillars to Butterflies

For Christmas Brayden got a pretty neat gift from one of her cousins...a butterfly net. It had a form in it to send away for the caterpillars. We sent in for them and waited patiently for them to arrive. Brayden watched the mail everyday.

It took a while but they arrived on her birthday which was a fun little surprise. I didn't take a picture of what they looked like when they first arrived. They were really tiny. In a matter of days they grew about eight times their size. They ate the food that was already provided for them in the container. We just watched them grow. It got pretty gross in there as they filled the entire container with their waste. I tried to keep my opinions to myself and Brayden was in awe as she watched them move and grow. After about a week they formed into chrysalides. It was pretty neat to watch as they climbed to the top to hang upside down and then turned into this shell-like structure. At this point it was time to transfer them into the net. I couldn't believe I was actually touching it. I swore I was going to make Brandon do it but it was just too cool.

They stayed in the net for about another week undergoing whatever transformation that was taking place. Everyday we checked on them to see if anything had happened.

Eventually they started making their way out. It happened so fast. One minute we would look and the next minute we would see a butterfly standing there. They excreted this red stuff on their way out. The only way I got this next picture was because this particular one never made it all the way out. It was still alive though and we felt bad for the poor thing. We had eight out of the ten become beautiful butterflies. We kept them around for about another week waiting for the weather to be nice enough to let them go.

Brayden sure enjoyed having her butterflies around to play with.

It was a very neat thing to watch and if you think about it the whole process is filled with gospel application. As Brayden grows I look forward to teaching her more about what that is.

Last Sunday the weather turned really nice... we had to let them go because we were leaving out of town and I didn't want them laying eggs in our net. They only had another week left in their life cycle.

I promised her we would get some more eventually.

So, we got a new video camera and I got a lot of video of letting the butterflies go but have not been able to figure out how to upload them onto the onetruemedia video thing I use. I did get some video using our old camera though of the end of the experience.

One of the butterflies was a little gimpy and was unable to fly really well so the kids were able to play with that one a little bit longer than the others.