Butterfly Museum Date Idea

 

So, it's finally warm in New England....ish....when the wind isn't freaking crazy.........and it's not raining......

Anyway, I had just about exhausted my options on inside/cold weather cheap things to do.  I hate winter.  Have I mentioned that before?  Cold and I, we don't get along.  So, when it was warmer-ish-kinda but not nice enough to go outside, I found this great cheap date idea: the Butterfly Museum!!!

Magic Wings is open year round.... I found out after we waited until spring to go. 

Tip for a butterfly museum:  If you want butterflies to land on you, wear bright colors.  I made sure to wear a shirt with a hood so I didn't get anything stuck in my hair.  The SO also made sure to wear a long sleeve shirt because his natural reaction to bugs landing on him is to slap them.  We didn't want to accidentally horribly murder any butterflies.

Before you enter the conservatory, you get to go into a room of odd bugs.  I didn't take any pictures in there because I wasn't sure if we could, but man those bugs were weird.....and huge!!!

Also, baby rain forest frogs are freaking adorable!

So, you walk through a corridor of air fans to blow all the butterfly escape artists back where they belong, and into a big dome filled with butterflies, a koi pond, tons of unique flowers, and QUAIL zipping around.  

I got one butterfly to land on me.  Actually, once we got there I was pretty scared of them.  I didn't want to not know one was on me and kill it. However, my crappy P.O.S. SAMSUNG GALAXY RING deleted them (Just got rid of it after 3 months.  Serious suckage!!!)

>:(

But yeah, I could have seriously wandered around this place all day.  The staff were so cheerful and seemed actually happy to be there.  The butterflies also scared the small kids enough not to scream or cry.  

Google a butterfly museum in your area if you have never been to one.  It'll make you feel like a kid again.  Hopefully the ones near you have as cool a gift shop as this one did.

Now, I expected there to be butterfly cocoons to take home and take care of until they turned into butterflies, but I never expected them to have preying mantis eggs.  There they were though...on the shelf...giving me day dreams of an insect army.

I AM MOTHER OF THE PREYING MATISESISEZZZZZZ' 

(how do you pluralize that anyway? Yes, I know I could google it, but then I wouldn't have all this fun pissing off grammar nazi friends :D)

I probably got entirely too excited for a thirty year old that I was going to have 100-200 little teeny tiny bugs that were going to immediately start killing each other upon hatching so they needed to immediately be set free........this is the kind of parenting I can get behind!!!

After a while though, I was really starting to think they were not going to hatch.  It had been over a month when I looked down one day while reaching over the little plastic tank and saw this

<----------------------------------------------

I shrieked, "WE HAAAAVE BABIES"

the SO looked terrified for a second before he realized what I was saying.

We quickly took the container outside and started scattering them about, because they were already beating the crap out of each other.  Right after we finished scattering them, a spider wandered along.  I....uh...moved it....yeah.  No, we killed it.  Mother's instinct. /shrug










Then, of course like any good mother I immediately took pictures for my facebook.  I promised my MIL grand-puppies.... this will work right?

My cheerios were promptly pissed in when a stranger walking by was giving us a weird look.  I told him about the preying mantis egg and how we were freeing them.  He thought I'd like to know that only 1 out of every 100 preying mantis survive to adulthood anyway so it was okay that it was going to pour later.

:'(











Then came the rain, and I assumed they all got washed away.

BUT WAIT...... a few days later we managed to find a few.  A FEW.  That means more than 1 out of 100.  Beat that Darwin, my babies are awesome!

We're proud parents.  We were thinking of retiring out of New England now that the kids are all grown and off on their own.  Empty nest and all that....

;)

See you next Tuesday!!!