Butterflies

On Friday, the kids and I (minus Adam) went to the Family Museum for their annual spring event. Every spring they have a screened in cage thing were they first grow caterpillars, then then the caterpillars make cocoons and finally break out as butterflies. In this case they are Painted Lady butterflies. Since Anna has preschool at the museum we watched the whole process, checking up on them every couple of days. After all the butterflies have broken out of their cocoons, they have a big release event where they release the butterflies into the wild. I thought it would be a great thing to see, so we made sure we were there.

Things did not turn out how I imagined them, however. I thought they would open the cage and all the butterflies would just come flying out going out into the sky, but that was not so. They were not so sure they wanted to come out. They were each coaxed onto a stick and then handed out to a waiting child. There was one class of older grade school children that were there that made it quite difficult for any of the rest of us to see, or get close enough to get a stick with a butterfly on it, not to mention the annoying media people who thought they needed to me up front. After picking up both Liz and Ben for several minutes (no easy task these days), we made it up to the front where we acquired a stick with a butterfly on it. Anna was with her preschool class, but I took Liz and Ben away from the crowd so we could get a better look. Lizzy held the butterfly for a little bit, but didn't like it when it started crawling on her, so held it most of the time. Ben mostly just ran around. He just wanted to play. I brought the butterfly over to Anna and her class as they too were having a hard time getting to the front. Anna would not hold it though. I got too close to the flowers and it finally flew away.

It was a fun and interesting thing to watch the changes over the weeks, and then be able to hold one of the butterflies. Hope you enjoy the few pictures I was able to take.