A Sunday Miracle

I didn't have a lot of hope left for our praying mantis egg case, but then - a miracle occurred. While reaching for the napkin holder during breakfast on Sunday morning, I heard this really weird scratching sound. I looked at the praying mantis pagoda and almost had a heart attack. The picture doesn't do it justice, but this is what I saw:

THERE WERE SO MANY PRAYING MANTISES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I'm not squeamish when it comes to bugs - but I had the heebie jeebies looking at all of them crawling all over the place. And then J thought it would be super funny to tickle the back of my neck - which stopped my heart for about 30 seconds and took at least15 years off my life.

We took the pagoda to Grandma Meow's house Sunday afternoon and let most of them go.

We still have a few of them left in the pagoda. We're supposed to be feeding them, but we're having a really hard time finding suitable bugs. So far we've put a few slugs, an earthworm and some other weird worm type thing in the pagoda. The praying mantises have refused all of the above. Picky little suckers. . . . . . .