A Beautiful .....moth?

To tell this story, I have to go back a few weeks to a hot day shortly after we arrived here in our fair city. Littleman and I were taking a bicycle ride/ walk in the absolute swelter of the morning sun, this was to my mind a great idea for exercise and to hell with the inevitable sunpoisoning. As we drag ourselves along my little guy notices a wooly caterpillar and shrieking with glee grabs it up to bring home to die. Now I say this because we have a long and painful history with caterpillars, we love them....to death. We give them leaves and sticks and little caterpillar houses, we check on them daily, we take them out to crawl on our joyful hands.....we kill them. Every time.

So, when I saw this unfortunate wooly, I thought..."Not This Time" and promptly took Littleman to the store to get a new caterpillar house. We took great care with this guy; fresh leaves dipped in pool water every morning. New and fun sticks to climb daily. We shook all the poop ( there was a lot!) out of the cage every day to give Wooly a clean house. The kids were obsessed....I was obsessed.

Two weeks ago, Wooly went into a chrysalis (cocoon) and we all got nervous. The cocoon stage is were we lost our last unfortunate friend. The days are slowly ticking by, we are getting more and more nervous and the butterfly fails to appear. Mr. K and I are exchanging looks that mean " should we clean out the cage and say it flew away in the night?". Then, yesterday as I finally decide to just clean out the cage and get it over with, I notice in the corner...A BUTTERFLY!




Wait, a MOTH!


who cares, really? At least we brought it to the end of its life cycle without killing it this time! It was quite pretty actually, a delicate orange color with soft spots, Big and thrilling to the kids who hollared and tried to hold it and gave it copious amounts of new wet leaves for the singular accomplishment of surving.

Hooray for nature!