We decided to do a Butterfly kit with the kids this year and it was SO much more thrilling and exciting then I could have imagined!! I had ordered a couple books about butterflies for us to read as we went through this experiment and it really helped!! The kit comes with a postcard that you use to mail off in order to get the caterpillars via mail. So I sent it off and sure enough, a few days later, five caterpillars, not longer than 1/4" arrived in a small plastic cup with some gooey yellow stuff at the bottom that was supposedly their food. I was so nervous that I was totally going to screw things up and end up without a single caterpillar turning into a butterfly. But, alas, we put the cup in the middle of the kitchen table (I know, kinda gross, but there was no way for anything to get out of the cup onto the table) so we could see if and keep our eyes on things throughout the day. I was totally amazed at how fast these things grew! Seriously, I think they doubled in size every single day. They grew tremendously fast and by the end of one week were over one inch long. The kids LOVED coming down in the mornings to check on things and frequently looked in the cup to see the caterpillars moving around or "sleeping". We went out of town one weekend, and when we came home, one of the caterpillars had already formed his chrysalis, hanging from the top of the cup!! That was so neat! Within a few days, ALL the caterpillars had formed chrysalis' and it was time to move them into the net. This is when I was super nervous. I was so worried that one of them was going to fall off the paper that they were attached to and be all ruined. Reilly helped me very carefully move the paper with the 5 chrysalises attached into the net with some tape, just as the instructions explained. Not more than one hour went by and Reilly came running to me, "Mommy, the chrysalises are lying on the bottom! They fell down!!!" Great, now I knew I had ruined things and we were either going to end up with no butterflies, or they were going to have some serious malformations. I think they ended up falling down twice before I finally went and got a safety pin and pinned the paper to the netting. Several times a day for an entire week we checked the net for any sign of life, as the chrysalises really show nothing of what's going on inside! Again, we were out of town for the weekend. We came home super late and put the kids straight in bed. When I went over to the net to check on things, I couldn't believe it....a real live butterfly was right in front of my eyes!! We grew a butterfly!! Amazing!! So exciting. I couldn't wait to show Reilly in the morning. She was SO excited!!! It only took a couple days for all the butterflies to emerge and it was just as exciting as each one took flight inside the net. We had flowers in the bottom and put water+sugar droplets each morning for them to eat. After a few days of them all being in there, we began to realize that they needed to be set free. Reilly's plan was to put them out on our butterfly bush in the front yard so hopefully they would stay around. So that's exactly what we did!! It was so much fun and truly something that amazed me at each stage!
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