bobby made it

Okay, this is a weird photo. Julia was helping me. That's her striped turtleneck in the background. The caterpillar, Bobby, the one who said, "Wow," when he saw Dad's van...

He went into a cocoon a couple weeks ago. The cocoon was in a glass tumbler. (Nobody will ever want a drink of anything at my house ever again, right? Oh, come on. The dishwasher heats to autoclave temperatures, all right?)

The glass sat on the desk, the cupboard, the buffet, the tall cabinet by the door, to the lake in the van, and on the table and cupboard there and back again... It seemed to take forever. I looked up on Wikipedia and they said two or three weeks.

Okay, then. We continue to wait.

Well, tonight Maria noticed a little peach colored moth in the glass! Bobby transformed!

We'd been looking at that cocoon, thinking something would happen with that. When monarchs hatch, the cocoon looks obviously exited. This one did not. How long since Bobby had hatched? No idea.

So after a little while, Julia came with me, in her stocking feet, in the cold wind, and we let Bobby out into the garden. He wiggled his tiny wings, and in a few minutes we headed back to the house. I took a catalpa pod (those are everywhere in the yard right now) and poked at the empty cocoon, trying to figure out how he'd escaped that little felt tube.

On the bottom was a tiny hole. How did an entire moth with a fat bug body ever slip out that bitty hole? Julia looked at it too, said it smelled funny. Nah. She also called 911 tonight by accident, but that's another story.

I guess a few nine and ten pound kids have also emerged from a fairly small place, but let's not go there.

So anyway. In the big events of the world and all the major news of the day, trivia this, but still a tiny little bit amazing. In a day where I drove around dropping kids off, picking kids up, waiting on customers one after another... here this weirdly cool thing happened in a tumbler out in the kitchen by the phone.

Okay, back to our regularly scheduled lives. love, Val