I tried

I'm going to blame the movers. The Friday before our move, they were coming to pack our garage and attic...or so they said. When they arrived, they took over the whole house packing every thing under the roof. I wasn't prepared for the house to be packed, and inevitably, some things were packed by the movers that shouldn't have been... for instance, the cocoons. Ooops.

When we unpacked them at our new home, we got quite a surprise...

We had butterflies!!!

Okay, so after a few days as cocoons, they were supposed to have been transferred to a large mesh container, where they would have plenty of room to spread their wings when they emerged as butterflies. The transfer never happened and our poor helpless bugs hatched into this...

There are five butterflies in this little cup... no room for flapping, much less flying.

They didn't immediately fly off, Grace was able to really check them out!

We quickly released them into our new backyard. They flew off one by one and Grace was thrilled! Maybe next year we'll try again and we will take a little better care of them!

we have a cocoon!

We awoke this morning to our first cocoon! Three more caterpillars are in the hanging "J" position and will be making their cocoons very soon! We have one straggler still crawling around. Grace was so excited this morning! Soon we'll have butterflies!!!

The first three are the ones in "J" position, then the cocoon, then the straggler :)

growing butterflies

This is Grace looking at her five new pet caterpillars. She's had them for about a week and a half and they've already grown from about the size of a grain of rice to what you see now...


We did this last year and while she did like it, she didn't really "get it" the way she does this year. She's so excited!!! I'll post updates and tag them all "growing butterflies," so once we're done, you can pull them all up and see the transformation... so cool!