Papillons

There is a cute show on Disney Jr. based on the book series Fancy Nancy. It's super cute and I really enjoy watching it as an adult so that's always a win if the kids like the show too. Ivy loves the songs and Kip has a few episodes he likes watching over and over. In one of those episodes Nancy rescues a butterfly. She calls it Papillon because that's how you say butterfly in French and France is fancy!

So I got Kip a butterfly garden as a gift for him to open at Ivy' birthday. He was only mildly interested in the whole process but we stuck it out. 

When the caterpillars arrived in the mail I was sure they were dead. It was really cold out when they came but fortunately after a few hours they all perked up and started eating. Over a few days they grew huge! Ivy loved the caterpillars and tried to get at them all the time. 

 

About a week later they transformed from caterpillar to chrysalis. We had one bully caterpillar that kept crawling over the other caterpillars while they were trying to transform. One of them got knocked off the lid and was laying in the food. The other one was dangling from the webbing on the lid. Eventually they all transformed. Once they all hardened I moved them to the pop-up tent and tried to gently reattached the two that had fallen. I should have read the instructions because it said it was okay if they fell and to just leave them on a paper towel. Opps. Oh well. They survived anyways. I guess I forgot to take a photo of the chrysalis part.

A few days later we came back from Storybook Land and we had one butterfly and one that had attempted to transform but had got caught on the lid and died. So sad. But all the others successfully transformed.

By the next morning all the others had transformed. Ivy LOVED watching them fly around and she was so excited by it.

 

 

We fed them watermelon for a few days and then let them go in the yard yesterday afternoon.  

Kip enjoyed this part and even touched one lightly before it flew away. And then he ran around the yard acting like a butterfly.

I know the Pre-k class does this activity because I've seen it on the school Facebook page. Hopefully they will do it next year and Kip will be more engaged having seen the process before. Overall, it's a pretty fun activity to witness. 

Back in Colorado, they had a Butterfly Pavilion that we used to go to as kids. It had an enclosed area filled with hundreds of butterflies and you could walk around and they would land on you. It was fun and kind of scary but I remember enjoying going there. I wonder if it's still around?