Summer Treasures

Digging for treasure

Our first week of summer is coming to a close and I am again reminded how precious my job is. Who else in the world gets to be a stay at home mom for two months out of the year and still have a full time job that they really love? Teaching is great :) This past week we have gone on many imaginary adventures...

We've been playing "treasure week" at home, building ships out of boxes and turning ordinary rocks into golden nuggets for the sand box.

For our second week of summer we're calling it bug week. What better way to kick off bug week than to see them first hand... an outing to the Butterfly house!

A pair of Paper Kite Butterflies... we spent a lot of time studying these.

Today was a scorcher of a day but we set out to Faust Park, anyway. I thought for sure it would be packed (like usual) but when we arrived, there was only one other family at the playground.

Katie at the playground

Ally has always been quite the cautious kid. She doesn't care for heights and is frightened by any tall slide. She has recently conjured up the nerve to go down the tall twisty slide (no tunnels, yet) and was dead set to show her new courage to me. Ally climbed the steps skipped across the platform and was stopped dead by the swinging bridge.

Navigating the scary bridge

But with much encouragement from myself and the other family visiting, she walked across the bridge. When she reached the slide it was too hot (oops, I probably should have checked that!) and then had to turn around and do the scary bridge again. Needless to say, our outing didn't start off on the right foot! After about 20 minutes up there we made our way to our favorite part of the park...

We headed into the butterfly house to cool down and look at some bugs. Ally was in her comfort zone here. For example, we were looking at a display of preserved butterflies and I pointed to a blue one and said "Look, it's your favorite the Blue Morpho!" She proceeded to correct me; I was looking at a blue hairstreak because the bottom of their wings are like a swallowtail's. My little miss smarty pants :) Makes her momma the science teacher proud!

Discovering

Once inside we looked for all the butterflies we knew. I particularly liked this one:

Anyone who knows me, knows I'm a sucker for trees. This butterfly is black and pink on the top of its wings but as soon as I got close with the camera, it camouflaged itself by closing its wings and fading in with the tree. Love that. :)






Speaking of trees, here's another one that caught my fancy:
A flower from the Chinese Lantern Tree

I like the botanical photos. Not only are they beautiful to look at, they're an easier subject to photograph... compared to a two year old who's learning to run and a 5 year old that's more interested in chasing down a painted lady.

I did manage to get the girls to sit for a picture on the butterfly bench. Although, Kate would rather look at her sister than me, I think that this picture captures the love she has for her big sister. Yes, they fight like crazy, but who with a sibling doesn't. They melt my heart when they love on each other :).

So that's our close to treasure week and kick off to bugs. Appropriately, Ally treasures bugs, especially butterflies, and I treasure these adventures with my girls.