The Amazing Metamorphosis

I think it came from growing up in the home of a 35 year Kindergarten teacher - but every year as a child my family would head down to the fields in West Bountiful and fearlessly hunt the milkweed looking for monarch caterpillars.  So, not wanting my children to miss out on this tradition, each August I would load the kids in the car and head to Utah Lake and fearlessly search the milkweed for monarch caterpillars.  Every passing year, with the disappearance of milkweed to homes and shops, it would become more difficult to find even one caterpillar.  Then a good friend in the ward (thanks JME) clued me in to an important part of the caterpillar metamorphosis - CATERPILLARS START AS EGGS!  DUH - it is a little easier to find caterpillar eggs than actual caterpillars!  Many small caterpillars lose their lives to spiders and other critters before they are even big enough to see.  So the last few years we have looked for monarch eggs and have had great success!  It is even more fun because you get to watch more of the process.  The other night AB and her good friend H found a couple of eggs on milkweed just around the corner.  Thanks to H's eagle eye and great ability to find eggs we now have 2 eggs that we will see through to Butterfly.  I will post pictures every few days - it is so amazing how this works and how quickly a little dot becomes a butterfly!  Keep watching or better yet go and find an egg.  Call me and I can guide you through this process - sometimes butterfly spit looks like an egg - an egg will always be on the underside of the leaf.   The egg is small and oblong shaped.  Check out the first pictures.  I wish I would have put my finger in the picture so you could see how small the egg really is - now I'm 40 I really need my reading glasses to get a good look at the egg!