New Babies & Old Babies

After I had completely neglected the beautiful hibiscus that Jan gave to us as a housewarming gift (sorry again, Jan), I felt a pang of pre-emptive sympathy when she returned a few weeks later with a plastic box holding a tiny monarch caterpillar.

"Sorry lil' guy," I thought. "You probably won't last long here."

But not only have I been wrong about the longevity of this striped larvae, but I was wrong about the quantity as well. Leah and I are the current custodians for not one, not two, and not even three young monarchs, but FOUR! Jan accidentally gave us the "surplus" box of babies rather than the box with a solitary crawler in it, much to our delight. Perhaps it's telling of my dim-witted-ity that we discovered one additional caterpillar over the course of three days rather than at once.

There's no miscounting these days, and now that two of the four are over an inch long, they are much more obvious in their enclosure. (If you can zoom in, you might be able to count all four of them in this shot.)



Leah named them all, in order of our discovering them. The first, and currently largest, is Joe Mauer, named after her new hero on the Twins team - she wears his shirt every day. Next is Stripey Guy, then Monarch Boy, and finally Joe Nathan, another Twins superstar. She wanted the name the fourth one Joe Mauer as well and have two Joe Mauers since they look the same. I persuaded her otherwise for the sake of identification, and she was o.k. using the pitcher's namesake since it was also "Joe."

So here is Joe Mauer on about day 6 of hatching. He's (or she's - is there a way to know yet?) got a bit of a wonky antenna that helps us point him out. He's exploring a fresh leaf of milkweed, looking for a good munching spot. Leah calls it "numshing" which I have to say, I like better than "munching" after all, when we eat something delicious, we often make noises along the lines of "numsh - numsh." :)



And here is little Joe Nathan fresh from molting his old skin AND EYEBALL THINGIE! I suppose everything's gotta go when you're a molting caterpillar... still... it's kinda creepy. The pile of grey-black stuff on the right (off of the tail end if you will), is the old skin, and the round object on the left is the old head/eyeball thingie - there's probably a very nice scientific name for that part. Creepy, but neat.



One thing I don't think I ever knew about monarch larvae, or really any bug for that matter, is that these guys poop a lot! It's called frass and it looks like little tubular pellets. Sure it makes sense that if they eat pretty much all day, they're bound to have to excrete a portion of it, but whoo-mama! That's a lotta frass.

When we're not staring into the clear box of frass-shooters, we're watching and encouraging the "old baby" in the house perform her latest trick: walking! Natalie's up and ambulatory! She's very tippy and overexcited about it, so she's falling more often than standing, but she can definitely take a dozen steps toward something if she wants and she has even stood without assistance as well. As if this wasn't enough, she's adding words to her repertoire every day. I think Matthew and I realize that she is hardly a baby anymore and that these changes, as we've seen them occur in her older sister, will come even faster and more abundant in the weeks to come. We'll try to get a little video of her performing one of these days.

Yep, the only babies in the house now have sixteen legs and shed their eyeballs. I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. :)