the painted lady

When we went to Sun Valley,ID this spring Lola chose a special gift from the toy store. The Butterfly Bungalow!!! You send away for 5 caterpillars in the mail. Then you can watch the transformation from caterpillar to butterfly. My initial thought was, “oh what a waste of money!” This will be a great lesson in disappointment (like the sea monkeys were when I was a child). So we sent away for the larva for the “painted Lady” butterfly. To my surprise they came sooner than expected and they were all alive!  So again I thought okay well they are all alive now but that is just going to be even harder to watch, since they are all going to die on my watch!!  They were very small, but almost 2 days later, I was sure someone had switched them out for different caterpillars, they had plumped up so much it was crazy. They continued to eat and grow like crazy for about 10 days. Then again to my surprise, 4 of the 5 climbed up to the top of the cup and formed their crystalis. The 5th one was a little slow but he eventually headed up top too. But I think there wasn’t enough room for him because in the process of forming his cocoon, he fell to the ground. Still being the eternal pessimist I just threw it in the garbage because I still believed the whole process was not going to end up with beautiful butterflies, so I figured i would just beat them to the punch and have one less cocoon to worry about. SO... I hang the other cocoons in the “butterfly bungalow” like it suggests, and wouldn’t you know it, just over a week later, the butterflies begin to come out of their cocoons. The first one had emerged the day of grandma Buswells funeral. Now how appropriate is that? After having to say good bye for now to our beloved grandma, we come home to a special miracle, a brand new, newly transformed Butterfly. It was beautiful. What an amazing transformation. To go into a cocoon a helpless caterpillar and be able to emerge from a cocoon a week later, beautiful and colorful and perfect and able to fly. They all emerged and it is truly a miracle!!! Lola would stick her hand in the bungalow and they would land on her hand. She just loved it. When the weather warmed  enough we decided we would let them go so they could do their job and pollinate our beautiful spring flowers. Some of the facts that Lola and I learned about the “Painted Lady” are: they have 10,000 eyes, drink through their legs, and breath through their bellies. Now isn’t that interesting.

Friends that were there for the Butterfly release party: Lola, Gavin, Hazel, and Henry.