Into the Wild

About a month ago, I finally sent in the certificate that came with Connor's "Butterfly Pavillion" birthday gift. A week or two later, we received two containers of the tiniest caterpillars I'd ever seen! They were almost too small to see, and were packaged in with this green-jello-like food on the bottom of their cups, so we didn't have to feed them or anything. Over the course of a week, the ten caterpillars grew to be about two inches long - I swear you could watch them getting bigger, it happened so quickly. Then they all climbed to the top of their cups, hung upside down, and peeled their skin off (all within 24 hours or so) to become little green chrysalises. That part was a little gross, I must admit. After that, you're supposed to move them into the actual "pavillion" part of the kit, which is a big popup-mesh cage, and wait 10 days. Then one morning, we started seeing little black and orange butterflies appearing as if by magic. As hard as I tried, I never timed it well enough for us to actually see one hatching, but it was still amazing. Now, I'll admit that although the kids really did enjoy this project, I was way more into it than they were. I'm sure they thought I was having a heart attack the first time I ran screaming into the room, telling them to come look at a new butterfly. Anyway, after a couple days, it was time to let them go. I was pretty proud of Connor, because this was the part he had been (loudly) dreading from the beginning, but he ended up being really cool about it. Notice him trying to give them some flowers in picture #2. (It's hard to see because of Elise's shirt.)
The weekend before we went to Utah, our ward held a father-son campout up at Chileo Flats. This was Connor's third time camping, but his first with just his dad (and, I noted with surprise, his first night away from his mom.) They told "scary" stories, roasted marshmallows and hot dogs, and had pancakes for breakfast. The elder's quorum was in charge of the breakfast, for which they apparently needed all of my kitchen utensils and pots. (Ryan was sure to bring them home, though, for me to wash.)Connor had an absolute blast. He came back the next morning totally dirty and hyper, telling me how cool it had been. This weekend is the father-daughter campout, but Ryan's taking the CFA, and Elise is still too little, so that will have to wait a year or two.