This morning we had a lovely surprise. We have been keeping a sprig of milkweed in a plastic soda-bottle terrarium. A monarch butterfly had laid six or seven eggs on the various leaves of our sprig and we have been hoping our sprig would not curl up and die before the eggs hatched.

Well, this morning PX, our daughter, was examining the leaves and announced that she could only find ONE egg. “Bummer!” I thought. I had set our “terrarium” outside for a bit and some ants had crawled inside…maybe they had eaten the eggs!? Well, I thought I would check the leaves once more, in case PX had overlooked the eggs.

I couldn’t find the eggs either. But what I did find were several teeny-tiny black-capped monarch caterpillars. They were only about 3/16ths of an inch long. Tiny…tiny…but when we looked at them with a magnifier, they were wonderful! Tiny heads!…tiny feet!…beautiful, perfect little caterpillars! It was a wonderful surprise to lose our eggs, and gain our caterpillars!