momtourage

Adventures with Caterpillars

It all started with a friend of ours giving us a few caterpillars and a bunch of parsely. We had a blast watching the whole cycle. And once the caterpillar formed the cocoon then Anjali's first morning word was cocoon instead of cheerios. And sure enough one day this stunning butterfly was there.

Now the girls were hooked. So we planted some butterfly attracting plants in the backyard. Milkweed, rue, parsley, fennel.. it was quite a spread! And they did come and we had one more caterpillar, when it turned into a cocoon Maya brought it to her preschool for show and tell. When I went to pick her up the butterfly was already out in her cubby!!! It made for an exciting day with all the kids bringing the butterfly outside and making sure that it flew away safely.

The third time, we put the caterpillar in a tupperware and it used to sit next to the kitchen sink. One day when we came back home after the cleaning lady's visit there was no cocoon only the clean tupperware. After I was done consoling the girls, I couldn't help but wonder what the cleaning lady thought of a cocoon in a tupperware near the dirty dishes. I even thought about calling her and telling her that we don't eat cocoons, not that there is anything wrong with it. It would have been a hard thing to do over the phone with my extremely limited spanish.

I think for now we are done with our adventures with caterpillars.

We love our new book!

Maya has been ready to read for some time now, the only hurdle so far has been ME. Any time we got one of the early reader books from the library,  they talked about the princesses, busy buzzy bees or at best some fishes.Seriously, Sam sitting on the mat can only be so much motivation for going to the next page. They gave very little credit to kids imagination, their sense of drama and appreciation of good story telling. No sooner would she try to read a page with all the ssss-----nnnnnnn-------oooooooo------wwwwwwww--- we both were ready to close the book and move on to something that was more fun that I could read to her.

So when we were shopping for a gift at BookPeople we were delighted to find this book by the fabulous Mo Willems in the Early reader category. Halfway through the book I asked Maya if she wanted to continue the next day but she insisted on finishing it. She even tried to include the '!' and the '?' for the full effect and drama.