Say hello to my little friends!

This weekend, we had a very unexpected experience. We were all outside enjoying the lovely weather when we saw a very cool, and maybe rare, thing. There, on one of the kids riding toys, was a newly hatched batch of praying mantis babies. It was truly fascinating! There were probably 40 or 50 or these little guys frantically running amok. Josh was absolutely in awe of the tiny critters. The kids didn't really know what to think of them. We let them run around our hands and Alex got to hold a couple of them. Abby just wanted us to move so she could play with the car. Now, the car that the mama mantis decided to lay her eggs on is bright yellow and red, so we decided to give the hatchlings a helping hand and moved them, one by one, onto the nearest tree. I got the camera out and tried to take some pictures of the little buggers, but they were just so tiny that the close up pictures weren't in focus. So here is a picture I found of what exactly it was we saw.

But I did get a few pictures of them that came out. This shows the top part of the car with all the little dudes running around. I kept the image full size, so you can can click on it for a bigger version to see them better.



I also got a video of them. They were all over the car and the ground around the car, but you could see them best on the yellow part.



So it was a pretty cool thing, all in all. The best part of the whole thing actually happened today though. Seeing as how we have plenty of birds, I figured the majority of the babies were doomed to a fate of bird chow. But today, I was sitting on the bench by the tree and three little babies crawled up onto my arm and sat there for awhile. I looked around, and sure enough! Those tiny babies were still hanging around. They even made it through the crazy hailstorm we had last night. They are a tad bit bigger and turning more green. Maybe they will stick around and we can watch them grow up to be big guys. They are helpful bugs and would keep the other bugs in check. So we welcome them and hope they stick around.