Watching a Transformation

For Christmas, Brooklyn received a Butterfly Treehouse. You send in for caterpillars then watch their metamorphosis into butterflies. We decided to wait until it was a little warmer to put this gift to good use.

About a month ago, we finally received our caterpillars in the mail.Day 1

We had five caterpillars in this little plastic container. The brown junk in the bottom is their food. In six days, they had grown HUGE and started making their way to the lid to hang upside down and form their chrysalises.

Day 6 ~ Three of five have formed a chrysalisDay 8 ~ All caterpillars are now chrysalidesMoved them into their "treehouse"

At this point, we are three days from our California vacation. Obviously if we left them home, we'd miss the butterflies hatching!! So we took these little boogers with us! Amazingly, they survived the ride.

When we returned home from dinner on Sunday, we had our first butterfly!!

Day 13 ~ Butterfly #1 emerges

This pattern continued daily until we had 5 brand new butterflies! Every night we'd come home from Disneyland, there would be another one out of it's chrysalis. I wish we could have actually seen one hatching, but I'm just glad that they made it through the traumatic journey with us to California!!

Day 17 ~ The last butterfly is out, but has a curled wing :/One feeding on an orange sliceWings spread!Once we got home, we decided to release the butterflies that weekend.

Day 19 ~ Saying goodbye to the butterflies!

One poor butterfly took flight and out of nowhere came a dive-bombing bird!!! We all shrieked as we watched the bird try to snatch the butterfly out of the air, but the butterfly narrowly escaped, thank goodness!!!

Remember I mentioned we had one with a gimp wing? We named him (her?) Nemo. Seemed fitting since Nemo the fish had a mangled fin.

Turns out Nemo wasn't ready to go, so we kept it for a few more days then tried again *(see footnote)

It was such a neat experience for the kids to witness the process it takes for a butterfly to be born. And I loved that they were already familiar with the thanks to the Little Einsteins, A Brand New Outfit episode!! We'll definitely do this in the near future again. :)

*Nemo didn't make it. :( I found it's body all dried up on our lawn a few days later.