Bear Creek Nature Center

Our next stop on our adventure list was the Bear Creek Nature Center.  The drive to the center was beautiful and the center itself was a lot of fun.  The kids loved the hands-on displays so much that we actually had a hard time getting them out of the visitors' area and onto the trails.  Once we did manage to get them outside, we took a nice short hike.  Overall, we had a great time on this adventure and definitely would like to go back and do it again.  Oh, and the Dairy Queen when we were done was fun, too!

The inside of the center

Kai and Maddie

A map of the area

Ethan was not up for having his picture taken.

There's nothing like a good friend.

I love the mountain views and I love that Kai and Maddie were still holding hands.

The Butterfly Pavilion

One of the places on our adventure list this summer was the Butterfly Pavilion.  Kai has been anxiously looking forward to this trip for quite a while.  We decided to go on Thursday the 7th.  It was bit more of a drive than we had anticipated as it took us a good solid hour and 10 minutes or so to get there.  (The Pavilion is on the northwest side of Denver.)  We arrived to see some small school buses of children and what looked like a fun place to explore.  Here's what greeted us outside the museum.

Once inside the pavilion, there were 3 main display areas and one children's play area.  The first display area is called the Crawl-A-See-Um.  I will confess that this was not my favorite part!  Inside were all kinds of creepy crawlies, the kinds that I don't even like in tanks.  There was even a guide letting people hold a tarantula and then rewarding them with a sticker.  I asked Kai if he wanted to touch the tarantula and he started to cry.  So we moved on.

The giant South American Cockroach.  Ugghhhh, this gives me the heebies.  And an assurance that I have no desire to travel to South America and encounter one of these!

The second area in the museum was an underwater area.  This area was not very large and didn't have anything that we hadn't seen before, but the kids enjoyed it.  Kai loved petting the starfish, but the horseshoe crab was not about to get any love from me or the kids!

The third and final display area was called "Wings of the Tropics".  Finally, the butterflies!!  This was a neat place to be.  We spent a fair amount of time just strolling and watching the butterflies.  It certainly would be a photographer's playground.  There were just so many beautiful colors all around!

The last area was the children's play area.  This was seriously one of the nicest play areas that I have seen at a museum-type place.  If my kids were just a bit older, we could have spent hours there.  As it was, we spent about 45 minutes.  The kids loved climbing on the bugs and running through the maze.  Of course, the other kids were running through the maze while their parents sat outside talking and so I stayed close to my kids.  As much as I could, anyway.  The maze was a fun educational place and maybe someday we'll take them back so they can learn a bit more about nature.  It was a fun day that we even topped off with some nearby Diary Queen.  Yay for adventures!!

The outside of the maze

One of the displays inside the maze.

The most beautiful blue butterflies.  The living versions were pretty much impossible to get a picture of.

The kids sat down to watch a documentary on cicadas.  We've been getting a lot of comments lately about how much the boys look like twins.  While I can't quite see twins, they certainly do look very, very similar--just differnt ages.

Kai did several "rub-a-bugs"!

4th of July

For the 4th of July this year we decided to finally check out our "small-town's" 4th of July parade.  We've heard lots of wonderful things about this parade, and we've even heard that it's one of the largest parades in the state!  Considering we do live in a small-town, that's just amazing!

The parade turned out to be just what we had heard--awesome! It lasted nearly a full 2 hours and there were loads of people there. The Kiwanis club has a bus service that can pick people up at various parking places around town and take them to the parade route, so we decided to use that. We parked at the high school behind our house and boarded a school bus that had to take an absolutely crazy route because of all the parade traffic. Kai LOVED being on the school bus. It was certainly a highlight of his 4th. We arrived at the parade right as it was starting and so we didn't have a ton of time to stake out a good spot, but we did alright. About half way through the parade a family that was sitting on the curb a few feet in front of us decided to switch spots and so we were able to get right up on the curb. That was awesome for Kai as it got him closer to the people who were throwing out candy. The candy was his absolute favorite part. I think I liked the people who were throwing out frozen Otter Pops the best! Either way, we had a great time and saw lots of neat things. Pretty much anyone that wanted to have an entry in the parade could. There was even one girl that just drove her car through the parade with a large sign on it about her lost dog. No kidding! But there were lots of other awesome entries, too. I think we'll be going back again as it certainly is a fun 4th of July tradition. Here's a small sampling of our parade experience.

Waiting for the bus.  Poor Finn got sunscreen in his eye and it bothered him the entire time.  I felt awful!

Happy to be on the bus!

Our initial parade viewing spot.  Here we're seeing some of our armed forces.

Kai loves motorcycles! 

A submarine!!

As Finn would say, "It's a go!"

This reminded me of our nieces Annalese and Tessa.

This is where we got a bit closer.  Yay!

One of Kai's favorite cars is a beetle.  He loved these beetles.

The fire trucks signal the end of the parade.  And they were LOUD!  Poor Finn started crying after one of them sounded their horn and the driver (a female) heard him and felt really bad.  She made direct eye contact with me as if to say "sorry".  It was nice, but not her fault.

That night we decided to go to Culver's for burgers and custard.  Since Kai ended up taking a nap after the parade (a first in a long time!) we let him stay up for the fireworks.  He loved his first firework display.  But I will admit that it went later than I thought and he ended up being quite a cranky boy the next day.  I'm not so sure he'll get to join us for fireworks next year.  We'll see.

We certainly had a great 4th of July!  I'm looking forward to doing it next year!