From egg to butterfly

For the past few years I have watched as friends blogged about their experience of going to a field to get milkweed with a teeny tiny egg on it to raise until that egg is eventually a monarch butterfly. I have never gotten my act together to do this activity until this year. I started off rough by collecting the wrong variety of milkweed, thinking I had an abundance of eggs and actually having nothing. So, once I figure that out I was set.

Here we have photos of our teeny tiny egg and a teeny tiny caterpillar. I actually though we had lost the caterpillar at first because they are so tiny. For a few days I could not find him anywhere but I could see holes in leaves meaning he had been eating.

May 12 May 18

Finally our caterpillar (named Princess Butterfly) was large enough to easily see. Every morning at breakfast we would put her on the table to watch as we ate.

May 22

May 22

May 22

She started to eat more and more. We would return to the field to get more fresh milkweed.

May 25 May 27

Finally Princess Butterfly hung in a "J" shape so we knew she would be forming her chrysalis soon. Sure enough, the next morning we woke up to find a beautiful green chrysalis with gold sparkles. The girls loved the sparkles.

May 29 June 2

About 10 days later the chrysalis was clear, allowing us to see the monarch wings inside. I think for me this was the coolest part of the process. This meant that she would be emerging from the chrysalis soon. Of course we had a full day planned and we did not want to miss it so we took the butterfly habitat with us.

June 8

I stopped by our school to quickly run something in and when I returned Princess Butterfly was gone! She had emerged from the chrysalis in the 2 minutes I was out of the car and she fell to the floor! I just knew I had killed our butterfly. I carefully was able to get her back to her stick so that her wings could dry out. They are very fragile at this stage so we ended up leaving her at the school under the director's care. She had been following our butterfly journey on Facebook.

We spent a little time at school watching the butterfly. You can see that her wings are a bit wrinkled and wet at first. When we got back from our busy day she was doing much better. We took her home to show daddy and to watch for the next day.

Katherine enjoyed holding her once she was dry and doing well.

Finally it was time to release Princess Butterfly. We waited for daddy to get home. We took her to the front yard. Each of us held her for a little bit.

After about 15 minutes of having opportunity to fly away, Princess Butterfly still was right there. I feared that she was injured or not dry yet so we put her back in our butterfly cage to let go the next day.

The next morning we took her back to the field where we first found her egg on the milkweed. We put her on a flower and said goodbye.

This was a great learning experience for our girls and we look forward to doing it again next year. It is amazing to see how one animal can be in 4 such distinct stages in their life cycle. God is amazing.