Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I don't know why, but this plant instantly turns me into a small kid again. I received it yesterday (4/15/2011) and I was so excited to capture bugs this morning and feed the plant that I could barely sleep last night! The plant arrived in pretty good shape with 3 of the 6 traps being closed, but all seem alive and there is no browning. 2 out of the 3 closed ones were wide open by this morning, I'm still waiting on a little guy at the bottom of the plant to open. The weather where I live is very unpredictable, it was 70F a few days ago and today it's 37F and snowing, so my plant resides indoors and is currently in an old fish tank with the light on and sitting in a small dish with about a 1/2 inch of distilled water in it. I found an Asian Ladybug (they are pests in my area) crawling about my kitchen this morning so I scooped it up on a piece of paper and placed it one of the traps then captured the results on my phone :) [...] Overall I'm very satisfied with how quickly the plant arrived and the shape that it was in when it arrived. The plastic cup protecting the plants was a bit smashed, but everything else was fine. The soil was still moist and the plant seemed to be doing great. Update: 1 week later (4/21/2011) Well... I think one of the traps is dying :( The trap that I fed in the video is turning black with the bug hanging out half way. Advice: make sure the big is 1/3 size of the trap or smaller, especially if the bug has a harder exoskeleton. The good news is that the one trap that refused to open for the first few days finally opened up last night. I've been keeping the terrarium light on for about 15 hours a day since it's literally been raining all week (gotta love the Midwest!). Also, I can see two more traps beginning to grow from the center of the plant. Update 2: 5 months since purchase (9/8/11). This thing is growing out of control! I was able to keep it outside and in plenty of sunlight all summer. It feasted everyday on a variety of bugs that it caught on its own and a new trap seemed to sprout almost every week. I'll definitely have to re-pot it soon, but I am going to wait to see how "wintering" will treat it (apparently you're supposed to keep it at about 40 or 50 degrees for a few months towards the end of the year. I live in a harsh winter area so I'm going to place it in water and put it in my 45 degree refrigerator). I've added an updated picture. Update 3: (2/5/2012) - I placed the entire plant (complete with the bowl of distilled water) inside of a plastic fruits/veggies bag from the grocery store and then placed that entire thing in the refrigerator sometime in October 2011. I made sure there was a lot of water in the bowl and that the bag was fluffed up in a way that it wouldn't touch the plant, since I'm not sure if it'd be healthy for one of the traps to feast on plastic. I removed it from the fridge last week and the plant seems to be alive and well. A couple more of the traps had turned black and died, but that did not worry me since I could see three or four more growing from the center. The thing that did worry me though was the fungus that had grown on one of the traps... I guess I should have cleaned out the leftover bug bodies before putting it in the fridge, but I don't think this will be an issue since it's just on one of the dead traps. Something strange, but cool, is happening to my plant though... the leaves are growing to be very wide. Before, the traps were large but their stems/leaves were tall and skinny, now the plant seems more flattened out and the leaves are much wider. I've added an updated photo. Update 4: (3/19/2012) - The plant sprouted a flower! There was a long stem (about 5 or 6 inches) growing from the center of the plant with a couple of flowers on the end of it! I wish I would've been prepared for this by buying another pot and some sphagnum moss, but instead ended up cutting the flowering stem off near its base because I've read that flowering is a very energy-intensive process and I don't want the plant to start dying off due to lack of nutrients.