The Butterfly Effect

One of Brianne's favorite gifts from her birthday was a miniature butterfly garden given to her by our friend Lori. Lori's entire back yard is one big butterfly garden, so she knew exactly what kind of plants would attract butterflies (our garden has milkweed to attract the butterflies and parsley for the caterpillars to eat). We had recently visited Lori's house to see her butterflies, and were so excited to have a garden of our own.

Our new little garden even had 6 caterpillars already living on it. Once we got our garden home and situated on our back porch, we watered it religiously, and enjoyed visiting our little caterpillars every evening. A couple days after we got our garden home, I started noticing that a caterpillar was missing. Then a day after that, 2 more were missing. I thought maybe they turned into butterflies overnight, but I learned that it actually takes 2 weeks to go from caterpillar to butterfly (thank you, Google). I couldn't figure out what was happening, and started getting really upset when we were eventually down to one lonely caterpillar.

It just so happened that Cooper woke me up to go outside at 2am one night. When I flipped on the porch light, I saw a tree frog jump out of the garden and up a tree. This whole time, a tree frog had been feasting on my caterpillars. Son of a b*&ch. As soon as we made that discovery, we started bringing in the garden every evening and putting it in the garage, then bringing it back onto the porch every morning. We were determined to see at least one caterpillar grow into a butterfly!!

One day when I was checking on my lone caterpillar, I couldn't find it. I started thinking that a frog had broken into my garage, when I noticed a little chrysallis (coccoon) on a branch. Two more weeks of bringing the garden in and out, and finally it turned into a butterfly! Luckily, Marty just happened to be home and saw the butterfly emerge from his coccoon and fly away. He called me at work to tell me, and I almost cried, I was so happy for our little butterfly.

Here is Brianne admiring her new butterfly garden. Lori even gave her a little pink watering can to water her new garden with.

Can you spot the cocoon in this picture? It looks like a leaf, and is located in the upper middle section of the photo.

After weeks of fighting off tree frogs, here is our caterpillar turned into a butterfly! Isn't it so beautiful?

Here is a close up of our butterfly. I believe it is a Monarch butterfly. We haven't seen it again since it flew away, but hopefully, it will come back to visit us soon :o)