The kids and I  saw a Monarch butterfly flitting around our new butterfly garden today!  It was flying around and I’m not sure what it was doing, but it touched every milk-weed plant in the garden.   Then it went behind the fence, there are milkweed there too, so I need to do a good check to see if it had a chance to lay some eggs.  It’s so amazing the connection between the butterflies and the milkweed, things like that always make me marvel at God’s creation.  Now I didn’t get a picture, first off because we still haven’t replaced our camera that broke and our old camera would never catch a buttefly in flight!  Too bad.

But the garden is coming along.  I had pulled everything out that didn’t belong and I’ve planted a butterfly bush,  a new little purple daylily (Little grapette) and some zinneas, which are all flowers that adult butterflies love. 

My next goal is to transplant some other flowers that I have in other gardens, but it’s been way to hot to garden.  Hopefully I’ll get a chance this coming week.

And our caterpillars are growing like crazy.   We had the three hatch last week and one is already over an inch long!  Then we found 2 more tiny baby caterpillars on a milkweed that had accidentally been pulled up, so we had five.  One didn’t make it (he died) and when I check with our Monarch expert, Mrs. McCaw, she said this was normal.   So we had four.  Then I found yet another caterpillar outside so we were up to five again, but then today I noticed that another one was missing.  It was our tinest baby, I think he must have crawled out of his cage.  I should have had netting on the cage, so we’ll be careful next time…   but we found 2 more eggs today, so we’ll just keep going!

Here’s another little something I found growing in my garden…  I can’t believe my baby is getting so big!

But my baby caterpillars seem to be filling up my need for babies… maybe that’s why I’m enjoying them so much?  I do feel like their parent, but thankfully I’ve never lost one of my own children… haha.    Babies and caterpillars, what a great combination!