Rosemary Stripey Hatched

Oh wow!!! She hatched, finally!!! Who? Rosemary Stripey our Black Swallowtail Caterpiller chrysalis. You can read about her here: http://ghomeschool.blogspot.com/2008/09/gods-glorious-creation.html and here: http://ghomeschool.blogspot.com/2008/09/as-of-tuesday-we-have-new-caterpillar.html

She came to us last fall on September 9th. A lady in our homeschool group found a bunch of the caterpillars eating her parsley and decided to give them away. It didn't take Rosemary Stripey (RS) to turn into a chrysalis, about 2 days. That was way back in September. That is over 10 months ago!! We carried her to vacation in Orlando for a week and since she has been sitting atop our fridge. I had given up on her. 10 months? Something must be wrong. I decided to put the box outside on the porch as a last resort. Maybe the house is too cool for her. We keep it on 78 degrees most of the time. The next day, yesterday, Bobbi came in and was telling me about a box on the back porch. It took me a while to understand which box. "Mom, it has a butterfly in it. It is on its back, and I think it's dead." All my hopes sank. What have I done? We rushed out to see. There she was on her back on the bottom of the box, but she was wiggling. Yeah. She's alive! I opened the box and helped her up onto a stick that Tyler brought me.

This is how she came out of her chrysalis.Tyler is the stick man at our house. LOL. She must have just hatched because she was still small and shrivled. She was still draining and drying. Oh, we were excited. She stayed there all afternoon and night. Our porch is screened in, so we felt lucky that she could fly around when she was ready, but we would still be able to see her when she left us. She is a beautiful butterfly. One of God's awesome creations. New life right before our eyes. I checked on her, frequently, all morning. She was flapping her wings a bit, but still draining early on. Then, after class, we were going to read our history on the porch with her. That's when I noticed she was gone. She had flown down to the floor by the door and was fluttering on the ground. I thought she might be having problems, but she was ready to fly. I helped her out and off she went. You can tell in the video I was excited.