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Mom, I Raised a Butterfly! Every year at this time my kids love to go outside after school and collect caterpillars that are sitting on the milkweed outside our house. They spend hours outside "catching caterpillars" and proudly bring them in one, two, three at a time to show me all of the caterpillars they've collected. Usually we end up filling a big ice cream bucket with sticks and twigs and put all of their pet caterpillars in it. This year my daughter Alyssa collected a few more caterpillars than I could tolerate. She left the ice cream bucket on a shelf and the caterpillars left droppings all over in it. She pulled it down one afternoon to add yet another caterpillar and my youngest daughter Rebekah got into it. The leaves, twigs, caterpillars and their droppings had been scattered all over the front room floor. By this time, the sight of caterpillars and the thought of cleaning up their mess made me upset to say the least and I made Alyssa get rid of her collection and set all of her caterpillars free. Later on that week I was doing some housework and decided to water my plants. I climbed up on a step stool and as I stepped down I noticed something attached to my plant. It was a cocoon. One of Alyssa's caterpillars had escaped and made it's way up to the top of our entertainment center, onto a plant and went to work spinning a cocoon. I was excited to show the kids when they came home from school. Every day after that the kids would have me lift them up to see if the cocoon was still there. We all anxiously waited to see what kind butterfly would become of this. But after a few days my kids forgot that it was there. Our lives went on without another thought. A few weeks later I walked passed the entertainment center and a beautiful monarch was sitting on top. I ran outside to get the kids. They were amazed at its beauty and my son was so excited he said, "Mom, I raised a butterfly!". I had to laugh. Not much effort was put into "raising" that butterfly. The monarch did it all on it's own. We took the butterfly outside and watched it fly away, my kids clapping and waiving. Yesterday, Alyssa came home from a friends house and found a monarch sitting inside our front door. She just knew it was the one we had "raised", that it had come back to visit us. I thought about that and how our kids are like butterflies. They start out as caterpillars and if they're wrapped in the cocoon of love they'll turn into beautiful butterflies. And they might even come back to visit once in awhile! Click here to read other articles by Shannon. Copyright © Shannon is webmaster to a website that offers Premade Scrapbook Pages that tell interesting facts about the day a person was born or married. Reprinted with permission.

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