Growing Butterflies

For Tara's birthday she got a butterfly house. It has been an amazing experience and about the best $20 investment we have made. Actually it's closer to $26 once you send off for your caterpillars. We learned so much about painted lady butterflies during this whole process. We received five caterpillars and ALL of them grew into amazingly beautiful butterflies which we released yesterday morning. We had to coax them out of their nice little butterfly home, but once we did it was pretty exciting to watch them fly away. One of them immediately took a dive into the grease pail we have under our barbeque grill. We saved him from his ill fated dive, but he was looking pretty bad around noon when we checked on him yesterday and was the only one who had not left the deck. I am wondering if he became a birdy snack during the day because he was gone in the evening. Anyway if you have young children this is such a great learning experience. There is also a ton of information, videos and pictures on the internet that you can use with your kids. We are ordering the tadpoles next.
Here they are in their chrysalids:

Here is one of them the day they came out of their chrysalids:

And yesterday during their release with Tara: