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 :



I call these the triplets :









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









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.



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



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.









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.









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







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 :













































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.