Annie's favorite birthday present was a cup of caterpillars! It is amazing what you can get mailed to your house these days. We got 5 tiny caterpillars in a cup with this brown stuff in the bottom that is apparently all they need to eat. After a week or so, the caterpillars hung upside down from the lid and made themselves into chrysalises. All of them except for Larry.
Larry stayed a caterpillar long after the other ones. He crawled around on the lid and knocked two of the chrysalises down into the poop/food sludge before finally deciding he had enough space to make his own chrysalis. We took off the lid and put it in this pop up cage to wait for the butterflies to emerge. Somehow we missed every single one of them actually emerging, but we loved seeing them dry their wings and start to fly around the cage. True to form, Larry emerged a day late.
Soon it was time to release Annie Jr, Sally, Lilly, Willems, and Larry into the wild. Naturally we invited the cousins over to witness the departure.
Bree is such a great leader. She controlled the mob and got them to take turns getting to have the butterflies on their shirts.
Annie holding Annie Jr (we can't actually tell them apart so I just picked a name whenever they asked me which one they were holding)
Around this same time, we decided to buy a crib net for Annie. She learned to climb out of her crib and wasn't napping any more, even though she obviously still needed at least a few naps a week. My little gal was a hot mess for a while there. The net goes all around the crib with a zipper door on top to get the kids in and out. My mom had the genius idea that we should call it the "butterfly net". We tell her she is a caterpillar, wrap her up in blankets for her chrysalis, and tell her that she will be a butterfly when she wakes up. This worked SHOCKINGLY well. For several days, she would wake up and call "Mommyyyyy, I'm a butterfly now!" Even now that she has gotten used to it, she doesn't complain or try to escape. One time I was worried she was going to be cold at night so I snuck in and put another blanket on her. I didn't zip it back up afterwards, figuring she could just climb out in the morning. Around midnight she was crying, and when I went to check on her she was sad that it was open and made me zip it closed again.
Our lives have been very much improved by our Annie butterfly net!
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