one hundred eighty eight

the caterpillar story:

for abby! :)

one day alisa, alexander, jaxon and i were playing at the park. we were playing in the sand and alexander found a caterpillar! he named him fred and brought him to play all over the park. in the mean time i found another caterpillar and named her lula mae (after audrey hepburn's holly golightly's character in breakfast at tiffany's). i kept trying to have jaxon hold lula mae but every time she started crawling on him he would freak out and shake her off of his arm! it must have been a reflex or something... it was hilarious! alex was nice enough to take fred over to the giant twisty slide and allow fred to take his turn down the slide first. when alex could no longer see fred he went down the slide himself. bad idea buddy. alexander gets to the bottom of the slide and can't find fred anywhere! he turns his back toward me and i spot unfortunate little freddy- stuck to the back of alexander's shorts! he was still wiggling a little bit and i didn't want to touch the semi smooshed caterpillar so i had alex take him off of his shorts and "somehow" fred ended up crawling home to his momma caterpillar in the bushes bordering the playground. we "couldn't find fred" before we left so we took lula mae home with us instead. i remember catching caterpillars in hawaii when i was in kindergarten and having them turn into beautiful monarch butterflies and really wanted lula mae to metamorph at well! so we made her a little home (thanks to alisa) and i went home for the night. the next morning i showed up to check on lula mae and was informed that we somehow "mixed up" the caterpillars and actually brought fred home instead. apparently alex was very upset that we forgot fred at the park! alex did a great job of checking on fred and giving him fresh sprinkles of water every day and a few days later we were thrilled to see that "fred" had turned into a cocoon! a few weeks after that we were checking on him and fred had become a butterfly!

but the story doesn't end there! we were so excited to see that fred the butterfly had emerged and immediately took him outside to fly away but he wouldn't fly! he just sat on his branch and wouldn't move so we left him outside all morning, hoping that we would check on him and find that he had flown away. no such luck. at one point he fell to the bottom of his make shift cage and i was thinking "how anticlimatic- catch a caterpillar, watch it's metamorphasis, and then the dumb thing dies. how disappointing!" jason came outside to see how we were doing and i signed to him that i thought fred might be dead. jason is an animal lover through and through (the man was petting and talking to the limp cat i ran over) and refused to believe fred was dead. he took fred out of his cage and suddenly fred stretches his wings twice and flies off into the backyard! jason and i were so excited to see him fly and were talking to alex but watching fred when all of a sudden alex starts bawling the saddest little cry ever! "come back to me freddie!" "i didn't want him to leave us yet!" "he was my pet butterfly!" "will you come back to me once you go visit your family?" it was so sad and the cutest thing i've ever seen! he spend the rest of the day watching for fred out of the windows and telling us all about how fred would come back to us.
and to this day every time alex sees a butterfly he says "i saw fred! he says hello to me!" unless its a pure white one, in which case he is always the first to inform us that "that's fred's grandma, she is going to tell fred where we are!"

the end! :)