...apparently. :)  It's been close to a month since I've written anything!  Now that the weather is nice we've been out biking, playing soccer, mowing the grass (yay!), landscaping, building birdfeeders and generally having fun getting out of the house!

For a while there I was searching every little swamp I could think of looking for frog eggs.  They're hard to find!  I ended up going to the RedDeer River with a friend and found a bunch of toad eggs.  Yes, there is a difference!  (What you learn when you homeschool)  The toads lay their eggs in long chains.  They looked like really long tapeworms or earthworms lying under the water. (They were in a little swamp/pool part of the river)  When we picked them up out of the water, here it was filled with rows of eggs.  Really neat.

I took some and brought them home and they hatched within 24 hrs. here.  They will hatch and develop faster the warmer the water is so it happened quickly in my house!  Well, I followed the instructions to the tee (according to www.allaboutfrogs.com) but they kept dying!  argh.  I was very frustrated.  The only thing I can figure I did wrong is that I didn't start feeding them as soon as they hatched so some died right away and started polluting the water which then in turn killed the rest.  I was changing the water once a day, though so that shouldn't have mattered!  Maybe I wasn't supposed to change the water that much...I don't know!  sheesh.  Anyone else have any luck with growing tadpoles from eggs?

We've got five chrysalids on the go.  (For those who may not know, a moth comes out of a cocoon and a butterfly comes out of a chrysalis.)  So we got 5 caterpillars and were able to watch them transform into chrysalids.  What an amazing thing!  They don't just spin a web around themselves to make the chrysalis;  They actually shed their skin and turn into the chrysalis!!  I always thought they spun the chrysalis/cocoon around themselves and then morphed into a butterfly within the chrysalis/cocoon.  That's not the case!   I can see where their 'feet' were because it's part of the chrysalis.  Check out this website:  http://www.learner.org/jnorth/tm/monarch/ChrysalisFormationLPB.html to see more.

Our chrysalids are going to turn into painted lady butterflies instead of monarchs but the process is pretty much the same.  I think I'm having more fun than the kids with all these things but I'm sure they're learning something too! :)