Butterflies!

We've been watching our chrysalis attentively the past few days and were so excited that two of our butterflies came out today - amazing! As they got darker and blacker and we could see their wings, I was wondering if/how those little wings would turn into big monarch wings...


Maybe these were miniature butterflies?


Nope, they got big and beautiful. We loved watching them hang and fan their wings.


We all got to play with one of the monarchs for about 15 minutes - it flew onto the grass and then onto a bush and we'd go get it on our fingers before it finally flew away too high for us to retrieve again.


The other one didn't try to fly until it was sure it could get away from all us onlookers and up all the way over the fence, and since I told the kids to not touch it until it left the branch first, we didn't get to play with that one at all, but the kids did see it flutter away happy and free :)

It was a lot of fun. We're excited for #3 to emerge tomorrow and then our baby caterpillar on Thursday.

And my daily discipline report for today (recorded in this food journal):


woke up at 7:30 - went to bed at midnight = 7.5 hours sleep
7:30 - cottage cheese, yogurt, great grains (270)
8:00 - exercise challenge - 400 lunges, plank and reverse plank 3x each for 1 min each
11:00 - chocolate shake and celery (300)
12:00 - wheat thins, cream cheese, tomato (330)
2:00 - ham, tortialla, cheese, lettuce and tomato (270)
5:00 - few chicken nuggets as I made dinner (guessing 150)
6:00 - Vanilla Protein Pancake (300)
Total calories - 1620 and I don't have the munchies or anything, so that's good! Almost 10:00 - heading up to bed soon, hopefully will get the kids in bed and myself too before 11.

And just to be accountable, yesterday I must report that I did end the evening slightly stressed and thus in my weakened condition had two balls of the frozen cookie dough since we were outside lighting fireworks and the box freezer was right there taunting me... Time to own up to my actions and look up how many calories are in those babies. Didn't say on the box, (probably not a good sign if the company is afraid to tell you!) And I couldn't find the nutritional value of Otis' oatmeal chocolate chip online either, but from the types of frozen dough that I found and their calories, I'm guessing each of those balls of dough is 170 calories!!!! Yikes. I've been nibbling on those quite a bit and didn't think they were that naughty. But even with the two balls of cookie dough adding 340 at the end, yesterday was still okay overall at 1800 calories (lucky for me I woke up so late I guess)

And lastly for your entertainment, here's Brian Regan talking about butterflies. I wouldn't have had any questions about butterflies before this summer, but now I might, but we've already looked up a lot of the answers. The funniest part of that clip starts at 1:30. "Don't even get me started!..."