Caterpillars

I think I am a little obsessed with these guys. I am seriously so fascinated. The kids seemed excited too, but I am just loving watching them grow! Since we're only in school 2 days a week, I'll be updating their progress on the blog so your kids won't miss a thing!
By the way, preschoolers are so fun. Some of them had no idea caterpillars turn into butterflies (I forget their age and life experience sometimes) so this whole idea is so cool to them. So excited to introduce them to this fun life cycle!
So, the caterpillars arrived Tuesday night and were super tiny. Wednesday, the kids enjoyed watching them wiggle around, and we drew little squiggly caterpillars in our journals.
 April 16
tiny little guys

 April 18
Only 2 days later, and already quite a bit bigger. They're also spun webs all over the jar. Instead of being all black, they have little white spots on their backs now.

 See their spots?

 I think it's cool how they hang on with their back legs and keep their front legs tucked up while they chill/sleep. Not really sure what they're doing. :)

I'm becoming quite the caterpillar photographer. It's not easy getting a camera to focus on these little guys!

 April 19
Even bigger and shedding their skin! So, we (me, my daughter, and niece) were watching them today and noticed more big black spiky balls in the jar, and it's their skin. One of them had shed this bigger piece (there are lots of small ones in there too) and we even saw him nibbling on it.  A little bit later, we noticed a caterpillar had a spiky ball at one end, and a small black dot at the other. As he squirmed, both pieces fell off and I realized we had just watched him finish shedding his skin. The big spiky balls are the skin, and the small black ball in the pic below is the skin off its head. This guy is now much lighter in color and with his tan head, we could see his eyes and mouth really well. His spikes are white too. I got this picture of him, and within an hour, his head was black again.

 See all the webs they're making? Didn't know that was going to happen.

 2 are white and fuzzy now. I'm sure the rest will be soon too.

 Trying to get a pic of the guy who's about the shed his skin, but it's hard to tell. He's been there still quite awhile and I can see the black dot on his head coming off and you can see back behind his head that he's been wiggling out of his skin a bit.