Becoming Mr. Butterfly - Metamorphosis of a Monarch Butterfly

This past October my mom showed up to my son's first birthday party and said she brought us a pet. I just stared at her like are you serious while thinking to myself, "I have three little kids, I don't want to take care of a pet" but it ended up being the best pet ever and my kids loved it. 

My mom's classroom learns about metamorphosis every school year and this past year they had a couple extra caterpillars so she brought one for my kids to watch and learn about metamorphosis as well. 

You start out with a caterpillars that you have to feed green leaves to and clean out the container. Basically stick a leaf or two in the container and replace them when they are gone. 

Keep scrolling to the bottom if you want to see some butterfly eggs!

After a few days the caterpillar will climb to the top of the container and attach itself using silk and form a "J" shape. The caterpillar will then began to form what is called a Chrysalis. 

The Chrysalis will be the caterpillars home for the next ten days or so while it makes the transformation into a Monarch Butterfly. This process is called metamorphosis. As the days go on, the Chrysalis will start to become darker. You will be able to see the butterfly wings. The darker the Chrysalis becomes, the close you are to having a butterfly. 

The second picture where the Chrysalis is darker was taken minutes before the butterfly emerged. I took the picture, sat down to eat breakfast, looked up and he was out so I just missed it. 

My kids immediately came running into the kitchen to see the butterfly still hanging from the top of the container. They were so excited and fascinated that they stared at it most of the day.

The butterfly eventually dropped to the bottom of the container where we were able to tell that it was a male butterfly. Male butterflies supposedly have black dots in the middle of their bottom wings. You can see this in one of the pictures below. 

Once my husband came home, we let the butterfly go outside by our flowers. We tried to let my son hold the butterfly but he screamed and ran away. As soon as my daughter built up enough courage to hold the butterfly, I snapped a picture and he flew away.

We watched as he landed at the top of our tree and chilled there for the rest of the evening. A few days later my daughter spotted a Monarch butterfly in our neighborhood so we are hoping it was him. Maybe this year we will see some Monarch butterflies around the neighborhood.

My kids really liked their pet butterfly. Every time we read the book, The Hungry Caterpillar, my daughter says "That is like what our butterfly did". This was an awesome experience and I am glad that my kids got to watch the metamorphosis process through an animal as beautiful as the Monarch Butterfly.

If you ever get the chance to experience the metamorphosis of a butterfly, I highly recommend it. It is a great learning experience for children and cool to watch. If not, I'm sure you can find a video out there or just show you children the pictures I took.

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UPDATE - September 2019

This is the third year my kids have gotten to experience the metamorphosis process and every year they are still super excited when my mom shows up with their temporary pet caterpillars. 

This year the caterpillars had newly hatched. They were the smallest we had ever seen, you could barely see them. My mom also brought down some butterfly eggs to show the kids. I have never seen butterfly eggs before so figured I'd share!

The white dots on the back of the leaf are the butterfly eggs. When they hatched, the caterpillar was barely bigger than the egg and looked like a tiny black line on the leaf.

Within a few days, the caterpillar gets about the size of the one pictured below. The more it eats, the bigger it becomes. We've had our caterpillars for a week and they are almost the size of the big one pictured above. We can't wait to watch our caterpillars become butterflies!

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