They're ALIVE!!!

We were beginning to think they would never hatch. Remember the egg sack that arrived in the mail? We've been watching it for days and days. The other morning I glance into the cage and was freaked out to see a hundred tiny, creepy, spider-like creatures crawling around. I screamed for Jefferson to come see. The boys spent a good part of the afternoon just staring at the praying mantis'. Just looking at the cage makes me instantly itch all over. Okay, I'll admit, they're a little cool.

Jefferson adores his 'new pets', his "Pamantises." He has been spending his days in the yard searching for bugs to feed his 'pamantises'. We're probably not doing everything we can to encourage their survival, but we're doing our best (sounds like our child-raising). We just tossed in the bottle of fruit flies into the cage for them to eat themselves, as opposed to feeding the flies to them with tweezers. Since they hatched I would say 2/3 are dead. I guess that's how it would work in the real world. We plan on letting some of them go in our yard, but hold on to a couple of them.
The whole process is pretty cool for Jefferson to watch. He's loving every minute of it. He even brought them into school for show-and-tell.
My fear (nightmare) was that someone would unzip the top of the cage and my house would be full of 'pamantises'. That hasn't happened, thankfully. I'm actually, sort of, kind of enjoying these little critters. They make for a good conversation topic when someone comes over to visit. My neighbor was over and when she looked into the cage she said "where are they?" WHERE AREN'T THEY? If anyone feels the desire to hatch their own praying mantis eggs, my advice is to NOT purchase them online. We paid over $15 for our egg sack. We went to the farmer's market last week and saw a man selling them for $3.50 or 3/$10. I guess people buy them for their gardens. Anyhow, I'll keep you updated if anything extremely exciting happens!