We’ve been responsible for more than ourselves lately. Mom ordered us caterpillars for our butterfly habitat and a tadpole (another one) for our grow-a-frog kit. We loved the caterpillars. 10 tiny ones came in two separate cups in the mail. We watched them double in size every day. It was amazing. They spun silk webs. And the ate and molted. Ate and molted. And ate and molted. Then they attached themselves to the underside of the top and hardened. Before we knew it, they were cocoons.
Meanwhile, our tadpole grew legs with teeny toes. Our new taddy is see through. So, we can watch his heart beat. Its amazing. When he grows into a frog, he’ll stay in the water. He’s not a normal bullfrog (which didn’t fare so well in our aquarium). We are watching every day for his legs to get bigger and for his arms to start to grow too. Once they do, he’ll absorb his tail and start looking more and more like a frog.
Isaac wasn’t lost in all this animal love. We all worked as a team to brush him in the garage. Tessa and Emmett had brushes, Riley had the vacuum to suck up all the hair, and Mommy supervised. Isaac was a very, very good sport. Even when Riley sucked up his ear with the vacuum hose, he just whined as if asking “Is this all truly necessary?” We gave him the okay to jump up after about 10 minutes, at which point he ran into the house and upstairs to hide in a back bedroom. Maybe he wasn’t having as much fun as we were?
Before we knew it, our butterflies emerged from their chrysalis. All of them. They were sneaky about it. We never actually saw them emerging. One second they were all packed into their cocoon, and the next they were stretching their wings and holding on tight to the mesh wall of their habitat. And when we took them outside to let them go free, they didn’t want to leave it. (The uncharacteristically low temperatures might have had something to do with that. But if we didn’t set them free, they’d lay eggs in the house and Mom didn’t want that.) So we held them on the tips of our fingers adding our own heat to that of the weak sunlight, waiting for their wings to warm. When they decided they were ready, they flapped up and away, and we wished them well.
With love,
The Pigs
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