Our Precious Monarch Butterfly

We bought a milkweed plant last spring and it had 5 Monarch Butterflies on it. We followed this little guy (or gal...we can't tell which) from caterpillar stage all the way until adult.


It ate and ate, and then ate some more! For two weeks all it did was eat.






And then one day it crawled onto our fence and started to spin a tiny little dot of silk. It attached one end to the silk and then hung itself upside down.

Within hours this is what it looked like. This is it's chrysalis.

The chrysalis has a beautiful gold ring around the top of it.











After two more weeks the chrysalis became completely transparent. This is just hours before the butterfly emerged. You can see the orange color of it's wings.








It had been 14 days exactly, and I knew it's time was getting close. We had begun to look at it almost every hour because we wanted desperately to see this Monarch that we loved say "hello" to the world.







We checked on it once and all was the same. Then about an hour later, I was hanging clothes out on the line, and I looked over and there he was, out of his chrysalis just sitting on what remained of the chrysalis shell.









We sat and watch him for almost 3 hours. We didn't know it would take this long for his wings to dry. We just there, eyes glued to him, camera ready, so that we could capture what we knew was a once in a life time experience. We wanted to see him take his first flight. We wanted to make sure a predator didn't get him before he could fly.

I kept taking video of him as he was drying his wings. He would open and close them over and over. Then he crawled up the fence and stopped and dried them some more.

I kept taking video, thinking every moment would be the moment he would fly away.



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Finally, when we thought he would never fly, I turned on my camera and started filming. All of a sudden he flew right past my son, and then up into our tree. We lost him for a little while and then found him again. We knew it was him because he kept sitting on a tree branch drying his wings again. We watched him all afternoon.


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God is so good to let us have such a memorable and loving experience.