It's a Boy!!!!

I am so excited! We witnessed the birth of another Monarch butterfly this afternoon from our huge butterfly milkweed plant! We have actually been watching the green chrysalis for more than two weeks and to be honest, I was beginning to think that maybe it was a "dud". I don't remember seeing a chrysalis stay green for so long. Maybe it was sort of in hibernation due to the cold snaps in weather that we've had in recent weeks, but I thought our little cocoon wasn't going to make it. Then, yesterday Sierra came running in from outside and told me that the chrysalis was now black and she could see the Monarch butterfly inside of it! She was right! This morning, as we all left to go out for breakfast, we noticed that the chrysalis was very black and you could see through it at the same time. You could see the orange wings with the black lines. Upon returning from breakfast this morning and running an errand, the cocoon looked as if it were about to burst open. That's when we knew it was getting close to seeing the little butterfly hatch! So we clipped the branch off the plant and took it inside the house and placed in inside a mason jar. I was determined to actually watch the little butterfly hatch this time. Back in May, when we saw a chrysalis turn into a butterfly, we missed the actual process of seeing the butterfly come right out of the cocoon. It happened so fast and since we didn't know exactly what to look for or how long the whole process actually takes, we only got to see the butterfly right after it came out. But today, we sat and stared at that chrysalis for about 10 minutes while it was in the jar in our kitchen. Sure enough, we saw the chrysalis wiggle and then out popped the Monarch butterfly!! Yippee..we witnessed its official birth and the kids all got to see it, too! I was excited [and I still am] because it's such a unique process! This time, we were able to determine that our little butterfly is a BOY!!!! It has the thin black lines and the distinctive two little black marks or circles on the outside of its lower wings in the back. I had researched this after our last butterfly hatched. The previous one was a female with thick black lines and no distinctive small black circles on its outer wings. So, now I feel like we are experts on Monarch butterflies and we've now witnessed the birth of a girl and now a boy! They are truly one of God's many small works of art in this world!! They almost look like they are made of black velvet with their white dots painted ever-so-carefully along their black bodies and the tips of their wings.

P.S.- The picture above is NOT our butterfly. We don't have our digital camera at the moment (it's being borrowed), so we couldn't take photos of our little boy butterfly. But, the picture above is what a Monarch butterfly looks like.