~Butterflies and Praying Mantises~
One of our favorite science projects each year is our painted lady butterfly hatching. We buy caterpillars from Insect Lore and watch them turn into butterflies.
We've always had great success with hatching our butterflies, but this time around we had one butterfly which was born with a broken wing. Shaila is an avid animal lover, and she immediately claimed it and took care of it. She named it 'Mephibosheth' (after Jonathan's lame son that King David took in.) We set all of the other butterflies free after a few days, but Shaila kept Mephibosheth because she knew he wouldn't do well in the wild. She fed him sugar water and tamed him so that she could walk around the house with him on her finger. When he had lived a nice long life, she released him into our flowerbed out front.
We also bought a praying mantis egg sack. We had almost given up on it hatching, and we woke up to dozens of little praying mantises crawling out of their container!
Shaila and Ethan let them free by our garden so they could eat all our pests 😉
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