Kenzie Mitchell, 3, watches the caterpillars, eggs and chrysalises in her mesh butterfly cage at the home of her grandmother, Brenda Roush.

WINFIELD TWP — They are dependent on you for food and shelter. You help them through the stages of their childhood. And when they leave home, you can't make choices for them anymore.

That's the lesson 3-year-old Kenzie Mitchell learned last week when she released the first monarch butterfly she and her grandmother had raised.

“We let it go. We were trying to get it to go into the flower garden. It wouldn't go. It just went into the big tree,” said Kenzie.

Kenzie and her grandmother, Brenda Roush, have been spending the summer raising monarch butterflies from eggs, and their first “graduate” left the nest last week.

Roush said, “A friend of ours put on Facebook she was raising monarchs on milkweed last year.

“We went out and got a couple of caterpillars,” said Roush.

This year, Roush bought a mesh butterfly cage and started stalking milkweed patches to collect eggs, caterpillars and plants for the caterpillars to munch on.

Right now, she and Kenzie are caring for 38 potential butterflies in caterpillar and chrysalis stages.

Roush, who watches Kenzie five days a week, thought it would be a good way to capture the interest of her active granddaughter.

“For Kenzie, she's very into it. She can tell you every stage (of caterpillar life)

“She stays interested. She fussed all day before we let the first butterfly go,” she said.

This is an excerpt from a story in Wednesday's Butler Eagle.