Time For Them To Fly - Setting Free the Butterflies

Saturday afternoon, 17 days after the arrival of our larvae, the time had come to say good-bye to our butterfly friends. Puddin' did an excellent job of taking care of her charges and we had hatched(?) 10 lovely little butterflies that lived hanging from her ceiling fan for a week.  In butterfly years that's close to a lifetime and we felt it was only right to give them a taste of great outdoors while they could still enjoy it.

The Dr. was in charge of butterfly retrieval. We were very surprised that they did not immediately want to fly away but instead seemed content to hang out with us for a bit longer.

FuzzyHead was extremely content to let them tip-toe around on her fingertips.

Turns out some of them were a little ummm "busy."  Official line we fed the kids. They are just scared and holding hands.  Yeah that's it.

Boo doesn't look nearly as sure of this as Fuzzy Head was.

Eventually one of them got the bright idea to fly away. The butterfly is the little bit of orange in front of the tree.

Reality came home a bit for Pud at that point. It's hard to let go of something you've worked so hard for and loved so much.

But we waved good-bye to those that would leave.

Until it was just these two left. And there were ummm still busy. Please know that the only thing keeping me from making extremely bad jokes here about butterfly love is my better judgment about creating crass google-able remarks on a post that has kids in bathing suits in it. This is difficult, very difficult.

So we decided that perhaps they needed a little quiet time on a nearby flower.

Which suited them just fine.  They stayed there for quite some time. And Puddin' made her peace with letting them go. She did a fabulous job with these guys. Mama is very proud of you my girl.