Butterfly Biosphere

Today our last butterfly emerged, as predicted. The weather today was mid 60s for a high, mid 40s for a low, but the forecast for next week is highs in the 50s, lows in the 30s! So I didn't want to release the butterfly outside. I asked on facebook if anyone in SLC was headed to southern Utah, but didn't get any takers. So plan B - the Butterfly Biosphere at Thanksgiving Point. I hadn't been to the conservatory before today, so it was a fun new experience. I didn't call ahead to ask if they took butterflies, we just went hoping for the best, and if they wouldn't, I figured I'd hold my kids captive for a ride south and we'd spend the day in the car. I told them that was the plan. Lucky for them, the biosphere took our little lady no problem. Other than she flew away for a minute from us in the lobby. A person at the desk caught her and took her in, we followed. Then Lily held it again as we waited for it to fly away into it's new controlled temperature greenhouse home.

It didn't want to leave, so it hung onto Lily for a while. Then Lily tried to let Natalie have a turn, I thought this was a precious photo - reminded me of the one of Mel and the little girls at the beach (pic 2)

In the pic above and the beach pic, I love seeing all their attention focused in on some little amazing creature and being present with the little wonders of this world. Abi got a big white butterfly to land on her - 

She's like a Disney Princess - at one with the animal kingdom...

 

Lily had a few of those moments too. She was in awe an dfelt she had entered into a magical place! She was happy when she got one of the big blue butterflies. They were really big!

So I kinda feel bad that I've chosen for this butterfly a life of captivity, but I also think that there should be butterflies in the biosphere - it's important for children to have a place where they can be up close with these little wonders. We were all amazed by the wall of chrysalis's, wow!!! So many different kinds!! And most of the chrysalis were pretty ugly and gross looking. No offense butterflies, but monarchs are my favorite. We were excited when we saw monarchs in the biosphere. Is that our girl? Did she find a male companion?

Well that's good that she has some monarch company. So yeah, she's not really wild and free now that she's living in the biosphere, but hey, it's better than freezing to death. And it seems to be a very lovely place to live and to have everything a butterfly could want, from what I could tell from my non butterfly perspective. It kinda reminds me of the Garden of Eden. Perfect, but not ideal, maybe cause it's too easy... we need to go out in the world and experience the storms of life in order for us to truly understand joy. So, there's the gospel parallel for ya. Owen might say that the bugs were a bit to close for comfort... Here I tried to take a picture of the kids and there is a little butterfly flying by in front of Sophi's shirt - and Owen did not like that.

Ok, take 2 - and Abi remembered Peter should be included.

Natalie was sad cause none of the butterflies were landing on her. But I needed to get Owen and Daniel out of there, so we left and I told the girls I'd be waiting for them in the discovery zone.
But then we went to the "Costa Rica Climber" playplace instead. Owen and Daniel went down the slide while I fed Peter. They also had a wind thing showing how the butterflies get blown up high by the wind - Owen letting go a yellow fabric in the wind chute.

Soon the girls found us. 

Soph helped Daniel build a castle for his caterpillar, which he proudly showed me - 

Lily turned Peter into a Lady bug. .

Peter, do you like being a ladybug?!?

What a cute little guy. Up the stairs on the way to the slide, there was a treehouse area where the kids could learn more about insects and imagine their own "entomology field research". 

They did some research on a orchid bee.  

It actually looked more to me like they had abducted some alien and were doing research on him.

But they looked cute in their little white trench coats. Then I was about done, so we attempted to leave, but got side tracked in the Discovery Zone. Climbing on a caterpillar...

Lily is in a chrysalis!

And soon she turned into a butterfly, layed her egg on a milkweed plant leaf, and started the cycle over again. 

"Take a picture of us!"

 One final pics - some bugs in a jar., haha cute. 

And then after that we finally did walk over to the dinosaur museum, cause Owen insisted we go (despite my trying to buy him out with ice cream). We were able to get through it quickly enough. I fed Peter while they played at the water table, luckily we've seen it all. But checked it off for Owen, then we headed home. It was a great outing, 4 hours with 7 kids, go me.

7 Monarchs

We had 7 chrysalis turn dark last night. We've got 6 out so far and there is one more to emerge. 7 total!! That's more than we had all year last year. So fun!

I guess it's kinda work too though. I woke up at 2 a.m when Natalie woke up and needed help finding the bathroom. Since I was awake, I went to check on them and two were missing. I looked and looked and finally found them, one under the built in drawer in a tricky spot, but got it, and the other was under the closet, but luckily not out of reach. Those little stinkers. I should probably get a mesh cage around them to help me avoid this problem. Big caterpillars are the hardest part when they wander. Butterflies are easy and fun, like all that "hard" work paid off, if you can call picking milkweed a lot of work. So we've been taking out the butterflies and hanging them on the hammock to dry - and it's a nice breezy place for them to fly away when they're ready.

4 girls and 3 boys. You can google that to see how to tell them apart. The one with the wings open here below is a girl.

Sorry if I've been posting too much about the butterflies. Mel got a few fun pictures of a butterfly on her nose as a mustache and above her eyes as a unibrow and on her head like a bow, I'll try to get one of them to share, it was fun. Monarchs are a fun way to pass the summer. So, not much else going on here. Just kids making messes. Today Natalie got into her older sisters' sculpy clay. I saw her working hard squishing together the pink and black, doh! I doubt your sisters will be able to separate those... oh well, too late to do anything about it now.

As I scolded her for getting into her sisters' clay, she said she just wanted to make a bracelet. She showed me the picture of the bracelet she was working on -

That pink and black one there. Well, I thought that was cure. She got the right colors, so that's a really good try, you cute little 4 year old. You keep working. I'm going to put away the rest of the clay but you can keep working on that one.

And another lazy summer thing - Wes and I have been working on this puzzle just for fun. 500 pieces that we picked up at the dollar store. I can do the edges easy enough. That's when Wesley came in to help. He and I sneak downstairs to work on it now and then.

Puzzles have been on my mind since Sunday. One of our neighbors shared his testimony that for each of us, our conversion to the gospel is like a puzzle. We all have our own story of how we put it all together and the things that we're able to figure out. So I've been thinking about that but I had the additional insight that some things are easy - the edge pieces are easy to see and figure out! Those are the "Light of Christ" things in life - the right and wrong that are plain and simple. If we have the light of Christ, it's easy to get the edges and then we know where the puzzle is and the parameters we need to work within. Oh, and the box is the plan. I couldn't find the box at first and thought I'd just throw it all away, cause even if I could find the edges, It was really hard to figure it out without the box and the final picture giving me hints and direction. So there's a little spiritual thought - if your life is confusing and you can't figure it out, go find the picture/plan on the box (in the scriptures!) Happy weekend.

Back 2 School

I took the kids to back to school night tonight. I usually don't go to them, since I've had kids going here for 15 years and get the drill for most every class and teacher, but Natalie wanted us to go, so we did. The kids liked it. I think they were mostly excited to show Katharine to their teachers and any classmates that were there. Natalie holding K while I listen to the Kindergarten meeting.

Daniel didn't come, he was gone at a friends house. SN&O came. And Katharine of course. 

For our daily butterfly update: this morning, we had four butterflies emerge, including the tiny tiny chrysalis. 

That one on the right has us worried too - I'm not sure why or how it got those lines on it, but we're hoping it doesn't affect it? It's color looked a little too white today... I'm pretty sure it's still alive, cause it would have gone bad by now if it died when it molted into the chrysalis. So, I got a video of the tiny tiny one emerging and shortly thereafter I noticed that he only had 3 legs! Then I looked at the video and noticed there was a 4th leg there, but it was just a short little stumpy thing and wasn't long enough to be any good. Cute little thing. We hope he's ok. He can fly, so we put him outside and hoped for the best for him. Look at how little he was next to one of the girls! So we called him Tiny Tim. 

Jerry drinking honey water this morning - 

We went to Thanksgiving Point today with the hopes that they'd be willing to donate a recently deceased  Butterfly to be an organ donor for Jerry. The lady at the desk seemed pretty irritated with us. Maybe they get "do-gooders" in here a lot with injured butterflies trying to get them medical assistance? Cause she didn't even listen to what we were asking, she just looked at us and Jerry and said "There's nothing we can do... Yeah, he's not going to make it." "No, we just want a dead butterfly" "We don't have any monarchs. We don't give away butterflies... you have to buy them..." Ok, we'll buy one. She said they are in the gift shop. So we go in, and there are these lovely framed shadow boxes with butterflies in them. Man, is that honestly the only option? We're not going to spend $100 on this... The gift shop cashier was more kind than the hardened biosphere worker. It honestly bothered me how she treated us. So I was trying to see things from her point of view. Maybe they see so many dead butterflies everyday, that they've just become calloused and don't care about "the one" little guy. Listen, we're keeping him as a pet, we're just looking for a way to help him fly and fulfill the measure of his creation! But I get it, they have short life spans. You can't get attached. "Millions of (butterflies) suffer every year!" So I tried to move on, but the rest of the day, I've been replaying in my head "He's not going to make it..." and Jerry is ready to prove her wrong, with or without wings! But we did have success at the gift shop. By the checkout counter, they had two little boxes where you can buy an assortment of mixed wings for $1 or a whole butterfly for $2. Unfortunately, they didn't have any monarchs. And also unfortunately, the whole butterflies were all too small to have any of them donate their wings to Jerry. So we got 10 assorted wings envelopes and left with hopes that we'd be able to find a match for Jerry in them. We'll see! Jerry enjoying the ride down in the car ~ 

After we got home, I ran a few errands - I went to get some tulle and a few wood rods to make an enclosure for the caterpillars, so we don't have an accident like Jerry's messed up wings again.  

I also got a few more supplies, recommended by the Live Monarch Foundation, for our upcoming butterfly surgery attempt to fix his wings: toothpicks, baby powder, and contact glue.

The evening was too busy and loud, so Mel and I are going to work on him tomorrow. We'll see how it goes! Also, I found three eggs today, and one already hatched! We watched him eating his egg.

And the circle of life continues.

Biosphere and Cold Pool

It's spring break for the Elementary kids. We did the Moab trip last week as our family spring break activity, so I was thinking I'd take it easy a little bit this week and we'd try to just go to Thanksgiving Point a few times. Today I delivered on that by taking them to the Butterfly Biosphere. Look at my bugs in a jar!

Over in the biosphere - 

This was as close as we got to a butterfly today - 

There were quite a few of these big blue ones. We didn't see any monarchs, sniff! I hope the Monarch butterfly population is ok. That would be so sad if they went extinct. I remember when I was a caterpillar farmer of those cute caterpillars!

And amazing chrysalis'...

Monarchs are beautiful. I hope we get some this year. 

Peter's favorite place at the Biosphere today was the Costa Rica Climber. The bigger kids liked that too and they explored up the stairs in the activities up in the canopy. Peter was content on the baby slide on the ground level.

After a fun day at the Butterfly Biosphere, we went to Federation rehearsal. Sophi and Natalie both practiced their songs with the pianist that they will be playing on Saturday. They took turns rehearsing and watching over their younger siblings who were coloring. 

They each did their songs 3 times. 

Here's Natalie's 

And Sophi's - 

That rehearsal was at the pianist's house, which was kinda half way downtown, so after that was done, we drove out to a store to look at a few machines that I had seen on the classifieds. The kids had fun exploring through the isles of appliances. 

It was almost as good as a corn maze! I decided to buy a set that was there, new in the box, a large capacity Samsung washer and dryer. 

I had looked and looked for good price but wasn't set on a particular brand. But after buying this, I found it at Home Depot for less expensive than what I had just paid. Oh well. Part of the selling point for me was that I could get it delivered tomorrow. So I called and am working on arranging that delivery and installation. It will be great to have a new washer and dryer! $1450 plus $110 for the delivery and installation and haul away of the old ones (goodbye and good riddance!) 

And final story from today. After we got home from the rehearsal and buying the washer and dryer, the kids went on a bike ride with Corey. It was really cold outside and their hands were freezing. Daniel came in and showed me his poor frozen hands, and to help him recover I held them against my warm torso. It made me gasp briefly at how frozen his fingers were. I just did one hand. And then he held up his other hand and let me know that that one was cold too. Yikes, ok!! Here we go - brace myself as I hold it next to my skin - brr! It was a sacrifice I was willing to make for my little boy. The kids were laughing that I was breathing hard. I said "I dare you to go jump in that pool in the backyard!" I had bought this blow up pool when I took Daniel with me to Costco. They wanted to put it up on Monday. Sure the sun was shining, but it was still freezing cold outside and I knew it was too cold for a pool, but I filled it up for them anyway. Well, this is what it looked like this morning:

So as I was gritting my teeth at Daniel's cold hands, I dared them to go jump in the pool so they could feel what cold is like too. Lily was like "I will!!!" and just like that we were all laughing and she ran over to the pool and with a 1 - 2 - 3 she jumped in!

Way to go Lil! I'm impressed! She's a little dare devil just like Ethan! I love it. Then she dared me or the kids did and I was like Allright, but I went and changed into my swimsuit, and Abi got wet with me (twice)...

It was very cold and refreshing, like the cool river in Costa Rica.

...then Sophi and Natalie did...

...and we spent the rest of the evening being crazy like that. 

Poor Natalie got pushed back head over heels by Abi, which was sad, which is why this video above ends abruptly, so that I could comfort Natalie as I scolded Abi. 

But Natalie took it well and she won the master prize for her being dunked twice. 

So it was fun and I'm sure will be something that the kids remember. Owen toying with the idea of jumping in... then he opted not to, funny kid. 

I was ok with getting wet and soaking up towels, because I knew that I had a new washer and dryer coming tomorrow so I'll be able to take care of all these dirty towels, yay!