Education,  Nature Study

Metamorphoses

We started school yesterday. We layered in a few subjects and “met” the books for the others. Then today, we layered in the rest.

I’m struck by how much our concept of “school” is in constant metamorphosis. When I first started home schooling, it was a very big deal to go from “vacation” to “school.” I had big plans, new books — and daughters who were quite happy with “vacation,” thank you.

This year, it feels just… normal. We’ve been continuing with a few subjects throughout the summer in a very low-key way, and easing into the full menu this week seems to be happening seamlessly. The girls seem ready and have good attitudes. I’ve made some adjustments and streamlined some things, working to emphasize the priorities I consider to be the most important. But I don’t know as I have “big plans” in the same way I have in years past.

I kind of miss that feeling. It was a big blast of wind in my sails in the first week of school. But I won’t miss the dead calm that always and inevitably followed — the one that came when my big plans collided with the reality of day to day life and personalities around here. Big plans are more dramatic, but realism is better.

Anyway, speaking of metamorphosis… The story of our butterfly farm continues to develop new twists.

Houdini went into the pupa stage on Sunday afternoon. I posted some day 1 chrysalis pics in this post. On day 2, he looked like this:

And today, on day 3, we can already see his butterfly wings forming:

I think the most striking thing to me is the way the chrysalis is actually within the caterpillar — rather than being manufactured from without, the way we envision a cocoon forming. A monarch molts 4 or 5 times, and in one of these routine events, something altogether new is revealed underneath the old skin… something the exact color of the single food the caterpillar has been eating for its entire (short) life. I don’t know about you, but I find that to be fascinating “food” for thought. What am I feeding my soul? What is forming in the depths of my character, waiting to be revealed in the next seemingly routine moment of transformation? Such moments of growth and adjustment come all the time.

Peeper, who was the smallest of our caterpillars — one of the ones I “rescued” from wind and rain — is about half an inch long, and yesterday he molted.

All seemed to have gone well; his old skin is beside him, and his antennae are in a curl next to him. I like this photo because it reveals his three kinds of feet (which we learned about from the Handbook of Nature Study) really well: three pairs of true feet (nearest his head as he hangs there upside down), four pairs of profeet, and the prop feet at the back.

As I said, all seemed to have gone well with his molt. But somehow a super-fine strand of… something attached his old skin to his antenna, so he’s having to drag it around with him as he goes about his business.

Poor little fellow… He reminds me of Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress. Hopefully the next molt will complete the job. Meanwhile, he has a nifty new sign on his jar, made by his primary caregiver, Older Daughter:

(As you can see, she’s renamed him. But he remains Peeper to my aging brain cells.)

This little fellow is no longer the smallest caterpillar on the counter. Oh no. This morning we returned from the milkweed patch with…

…who is by far the smallest.

What happened was this: we went for milkweed and counted around 15 monarch caterpillars of varying sizes in the small patch where we found our original three. We worked hard to find caterpillar-free plants to refresh our supply. One milkweed stood alone a little away from the rest, and I commented that it looked like a good possibility. But Younger Daughter went over to it and exclaimed, “Look! This is the tiniest caterpillar yet!!”

I only agreed to bring it home on condition that we return some of the ones we already had, so we brought Philip and Cinderella (now quite large), as well as Billy, back to the field and let them go. Younger Daughter prayed that God would take care of them. Then we watched them crawl happily along their respective plants.

So we now have Goliath, Peeper, Houdini in his chrysalis, and my caterpillar mutant, Caractacus.

I’m utterly mystified as to what Caractacus is, but it looks like a monarch minus the white. Surely it will pass into the pupa stage soon, and we’ll have more clues about its identity. It eats with unswerving dedication and sometimes falls asleep mid-bite.

Several caterpillars at several different stages give us plenty to write about in our nature journals. And as for sketching, well, it doesn’t get much easier than a caterpillar.

We even have a caterpillar bookmark.

 

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