The Butterfly Pavillion

This weekend, I took the girls to The Butterfly Pavilion outside of Denver. I had never heard of it before, but my friend Rachel had been there with her kids and said they'd loved it. So, Rachel and her crew, our friend Kim and her offspring and me and my rugrats all ventured to see the butterflies.

It took us about an hour and a half to get there, but we divided the kids up and the big kids rode with Rachel in her van and Kim and I took Julia and the little girl that Rachel babysits in my car. We stopped at Wendy's for lunch and then headed over to The Butterfly Pavilion.

Can I please tell you how much I stinking loved that place? It was amazing. I took about a million pictures (actually...over 200!) and I shall show only a fraction of the pictures to you.



We started in the Crawl-A-See-Em. This room was full of spiders, scorpions and beetles of all kinds. There was a tarantula there that the kids got to hold.

Elisabeth didn't even bat an eye. She's been there, done that.


After the bug room, we headed over to the Water's Edge. Here the kids got to see some awesome sea creatures and even got to touch starfish and horseshoe crabs.
Julia enjoyed the fish tanks.

While in the middle of exploring the sea creatures, we heard the announcement that they were getting ready to do the butterfly release. So, we told the starfish that we'd be back and headed over to the Wings of the Tropics.
While we waited, we met a lovely tortoise name Sunshine that roams the butterfly room.

We saw this giant moth called a Luna Moth. It has no mouth. It gets super fat when it's a caterpillar and then lives off of it's fat once it has morphed into a moth. Needless to say, it only lives a few days.

The kids all sat for the butterfly presentation. Basically, the "zoo keeper" (as they called themselves) presented a cage of brand new, fresh from the cocoon butterflies, describes them, and then lets them fly while we all watch. It was stinking awesome!
One of them landed on Rachel's son, Henry.

Then we walked around looking for butterflies. The kids loved this part. I won't lie, I did too. It was like playing hide-and-seek with the butterflies. Except, instead of tagging them as "it", I took their pictures.

My favorite butterfly of the day.



Here's where they keep the cocoons. I actually watched one of the butterflies hatch.


Mabel (another one of Rachel's brood) made a tissue flower to try to entice the butterflies to land on.


Julia was such a trooper. She went without a nap and didn't even whine that much. She loved getting to follow the big kids around.

Here's the random bird that lives with the butterflies. Apparently, it doesn't eat them.





Julia being sleepy...

Henry, the future photographer.

One of the things I love about Rachel and Kim's kids is that they are so good with Julia. Each one of them at some point during the day were leading Julia by the hand. It makes my heart happy.


After about an hour of chasing butterflies, we went back to the business of sea creatures.


I heart starfish.

Julia enjoyed the grumpy looking crabs.

When we headed back to the butterflies, one landed on Elisabeth. She was so excited!



Peter, Mabel, Kayleigh and Elisabeth listening to the zoo keeper talk about another new batch of butterflies.

And Mabel finally got a butterfly to hang out on her flower.


So, there was this fantastic gift shop (of course) and I told Elisabeth she could find something in there for $5.00 or under. Well, at first, she looked for a stuffed animal (which I knew she would). Then, Henry and Mabel started asking for a certain something that was only $5.00. When Elisabeth heard what they wanted, she asked if she could have one too. Since I'm such a softie, I said yes and we ended up bringing home...

Spidey. It's a baby tarantula. Yep.

Okay, before you ask me "Why?!?!?!" as everyone else has done, please know, I am a sucker for a weird pet. I mean, we had tadpoles for a while, if you so remember. Also, I figured it would be a relatively easy pet. And, I'm not too far off. This particular tarantula is a Mexican Blonde. It needs dirt so it can burrow, a little bit of water, fed twice a week (since it's a baby, once a week when it's grown). It eats crickets, which aren't expensive. So, I mean, it's a pretty basic pet.

Except it lives 10 years if it's a male. 25 years if it's a girl.
And we don't really know if Spidey's a "he" or a "she". :)