For Christmas, Lindsay got a butterfly garden net thing. It came with a coupon to mail off for some caterpillar larvae and then you watch as they grow big and then turn into butterflies. It was really fun to watch them through this process and it was neat to have a real life science project right in our home and I didn’t have to do any work!

We got 5 tiny little caterpillar larvae that came in a jar with food already in it for them to eat. They were so tiny, like maybe as long as your pinky fingernail. I had never seen a caterpillar so small before. But they didn’t stay little for long. They ate and ate and ate got big, big, BIG!

After about 10 days of eating they eventually started to make their way to the top of the cup and hung upside down. It took a few days for them to make their chrysalids, but once they did they were good to go. One of them had fallen down so we thought he was a goner, but he wasn’t and came out as a disabled butterfly. His wings were bent and he flew/scooted around in circles. I didn’t get a good picture of them in their chrysalids, but once they had been in them for about 10 days we moved them into the butterfly net. It took a few days for them to start coming out, but once they did it was exciting! We would go to bed and wake up with another one, or Lindsay would go to school with two butterflies and come home to 4 butterflies. It was exciting!

We have 5 butterflies total and we had lots of fun making sure they had orange slices and a paper towel saturated with sugar water for food. We would say good morning to them every morning and good night every night. Lindsay wanted to name them all but that got confusing once she got started so she gave up on that idea and we just called them all ‘little guys’. Not sure why they were boys…

Unfortunately, they are starting to die. If we lived somewhere warm we would have set them free after a couple of days, but it’s just too cold here so we kept them inside. The instructions we got said they usually only live up to two weeks, but it’s been almost 4 so we got them longer than we expected. It has been lots of fun and the kids already can’t wait to get more. We’ll see.