Monday, April 25, 2011

Scavengar Hunt Sunday

I haven't participated in a while, not for lack of trying. Hear are my entries, to see more entries head on over to see Ashley at Ramblings and Photos  :

1. Reflections

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When I was thinking about reflections I was thinking about how we reflect on certain things in our lives. Here though I was reflecting on middle-school when the magic 8 Ball was "it" and I'm also in the reflection on the magic ball.

2.Guess what this is?

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We dyed out Easter eggs with all natural ingredients again this year. This is the red cabbage that we used.

3.What's inside?

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A monarch, or one of my other children.

4.Playtime

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At tennis lessons Tyler gets hot and bored. We bring stuff to entertain.

5.Lawn & Garden

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A bloom with a succulent.

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Something Amazing

We have been following the Caterpillar/ Butterfly transformation like a hawk. I have sat outside staring at the chrysalis waiting until the kids come out and say I need to feed them. Well I might have missed the actual transformation from a caterpillar to a chrysalis but I actually witnessed a butterfly come out of her cocoon. I say 'her' because I'm fairly certain, after all the research I have done, that this particular butterfly was a she. Anyway so here goes:


The first sighting of a caterpillar :

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I call these the triplets :

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I know this picture is blurry but I just love it.

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So initially we kept finding the caterpillars in the ground around the pot of milk weed. I kept telling my kids to pick them up and put them back in very gently. I think my head wasn't screwed on at the time. I guess I didn't realize that they fall off and crawl something like 30 to 40 feet to do their thing. The caterpillar is escaping while he can.

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They crawled up into the top of our clubhouse, all 4 of them :

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and found some great places to make their chrysalis's. They stay in these for the next 9 to 14 days in order to ripen. Despite my best efforts the transformation from caterpillar to chrysilis was so very fast that I never caught on in action. I did look religiously and in about 30 minutes one of them went from caterpillar to chrysalis, shocking to us all.

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The amazing thing was that we just happened to catch this guy just after she had come out of her chrysalis. Her wings are still drying, which took about 2 hours. At this point I felt that I had already seen something so very amazing, little did I know that God had something else to show me.

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So as all this was happening Rob was kind of farting around watering plants when he found this otherwise undiscovered  guy about to hatch.

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Now I knew that when they looked like this they were close to coming out, I just didn't know how long any of this took. So I pulled up a chair and just watched for about 2 minutes. Meanwhile Rob had gone inside to get everyone to show them this new almost hatching butterfly. As one child comes out I see the thing start to bulge and I start screaming. I had no idea this butterfly would emerge so quickly. It all happened in about 15 seconds and I was blessed to wintess it. Even more so to have my camera pointed exactly on it. I can say this was truly a gift from God, I mean the chances of all this happening the way it did are just overwhelming. So here are the pictures :

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So that's it, in a nutshell. I waited for almost 3 weeks for this lifecycle to cycle and here I am. I felt like a nervous wreck having these things hang in the top of the clubhouse. I was so worried that the kids would inadvertently  knock one off. But they didn't and I've seen something amazing and am feeling so honored and blessed by such a miracle.

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