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"!