Announcing The Creature Catalog and Our First Species!
We're in planning mode for the big journey and relishing being homebodies while we can
“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty."
— Maya Angelou
Hey everyone, let’s start with some fun news: We now have an official “Creature Catalog,” which we’re keeping right at the top of our homepage so you can easily find it and refer back to any of the species we encounter to dive deeper. Please check it out and let us know your thoughts. In the coming days, we’ll send out our criteria and approach for selecting the creatures or, in some cases, how they select us!
After rigorous and hotly debated family breakfast meetings in which we grownups curried influence over the kids with extra chocolate chips in their pancakes, we finally came to a consensus on the first species on our list! If you’ve been following us closely, you probably know what it is.
It is one of our favorite species of all time: the iconic insect known for its metamorphosis, migration, and magnetic beauty: the monarch butterfly. It is fitting that the first species we’re celebrating through this project is one that is known for making big changes and traveling long distances.
We’ve already spent some time observing them and creating coloring pages, art, and videos celebrating this incredible insect. We will aggregate all this on a page telling the story of the monarch butterfly’s survival, which we’ll send out shortly. The plan is to give each of the 73 threatened species we encounter its own page with information, resources, and ways you can help them recover.
We’re still navigating lots of logistics in preparation for our big journey, so in the meantime, we’re taking advantage of the fact that we’re still in Miami and relishing being homebodies. As fate would have it, they became officially threatened a week before we launched Earth Parade, and we happened to have a resident population in our backyard! We’re excited to continue exploring some of our most beloved species that are native to our home state of Florida in the coming weeks.
In other news, we’ve been dealing with the usual carousel of illnesses that happens every other week while our kids are at school. This week, the temperatures dropped, and it was legitimately cold in Miami, which apparently freaked out both humans and viruses. The humans donned leather jackets and ill-fitting beanies, and the viruses seemed to spawn at Elon Musk levels. Alas, it appears all three of our kids have contracted the dreaded hand, foot, and mouth disease, which sounds and looks terrible but fortunately resolves itself in about 5-7 business days.
So, this week was tough for Earth Parade. There was not a whole lot of parading, but certainly a lot of nurturing, thinking, and important foundational work. It reminded us of our winters in the Northeast. A time for meditation, coziness, and setting intentions. We took after the monarch caterpillar this week and stayed inside the little chrysalis we call home, building strength and fortitude for what’s ahead.
To life,
J+D
