Butterfly Week: Link Love & the Butterfly Guy

The reason we chose to do butterfly week was because our neighborhood association co-hosted a butterfly event on Sunday with "The Butterfly Guy." Tony Delia, The Butterfly Guy, showed us some beautiful butterflies and butterfly plants, including tropical beauties like passion vines and plumerias.

There was also wine, capri suns, a porta-cool portable air conditioner (I must get one of these), balloons, and a bubble machine. The Shark was in heaven.

If you live in the Dallas area, Tony can do a butterfly presentation and event for your school. Pop on over to butterflyguy.org and check it out.

Unfortunately, I holding the baby instead of manning the camera, so there aren't any photos of the event. These lovely photos are from the interwebs (and are linked to their original websites, if you want to know where they came from).


Overall, a fantastic butterfly week all around.

I also wanted to give you some great links I found, in case you want to have your own Butterfly Week.

Here's some link love:

national geographic video: shows life cycle, the difference between a butterfly & a moth (and a butterfly getting eaten by a chameleon) http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/player/kids/animals-pets-kids/bugs-kids/monarch-butterflies-kids.html

a really cool PBS tv show episode about butterflies (elementary age)

http://pbskids.org/dragonflytv/show/butterflywings.html

great  website for older kids

http://www.kidsbutterfly.org/education

probably the best butterfly site of all, which didn’t come up in my google search: 

http://www.naba.org/chapters/nabasl/kids/web.html

For the young ones, some very cute ideas & songs

http://prekinders.com/bugs-theme/

good links – click through to each category for art, snack, & more

http://www.everythingpreschool.com/themes/butterflies/index.htm

 

 

Coming Up: Art Week

We had so much fun with Butterfly Week, and I've got one more post to do for that with today's outing, but I wanted to let you know that Art Week is coming up! We'll be focusing on visual arts and maybe on Van Gogh's Starry Starry Night. If you're playing along, you'll want to order a book called First Art from your favorite bookseller.

Hooray! We're looking forward to it.

Butterflies & Anthropologie: Mommy Time

I did such a great job with butterfly week, I got myself "a little sumthin-sumthin."

You know it.

It's a gorgeous candle WITH BUTTERFLIES ON IT. I know. Too cute, right? 

It smells like jasmine. I love jasmine.

 
It's a lovely sage blue-green color. And it was on sale, so that was hard to beat. Not sure what I'm going to do for train week, but this works for me.

Butterfly Conservatory: Texas Discovery Gardens

We went to the butterfly conservatory here in Dallas, also known as the Texas Discovery Gardens.
It was great!

See the brown butterfly? Sorry that I don't have a totally awesome zoom lens. YET.

We arrived just in time to see a butterfly release!!

 They had two big laundry hampers (maybe they were fancy butterfly transportation devices?) full of butterflies.

So pretty! Can you see the red & black butterfly below? It's called a Small Postman. I am not making that up.

And my baby's chunky hand as he tries to grab it? (No butterflies were harmed.) He loved watching the butterflies fly around.

It was a beautiful place, but it was SO STINKING HOT. Apparently butterflies like warmth. And humidity. And it was 95 degrees outside. And even hotter inside the conservatory.

Perfect for butterflies, if a bit warm for us. It would be lovely and tropical in the winter, I think.

The Shark ADORED it. He wanted to stay and run about wildly on all the levels and bridges. Sadly, he had to behave, and was not allowed to run about like a monkey.

 

The gift shop at the Texas Discovery Garden is AWESOME for butterfly and bug stuff. We didn't get anything there, because the kids were melting down and my husband was just melting. But it had every possible butterfly-related item you could think of, including a zillion different sticker books for $1.50. You can pop in the gift shop without paying admission, if you need to stock up or something.

We recommend the garden, though, and will probably come back another time! In the winter, that is. 

Egg Carton Caterpillars; Or, What's That Smell?

We made egg carton caterpillars. I realize this craft is kind of a gimme, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it!

What you should do, however, is make sure your egg cartons are scrupulously clean.

Otherwise, you'll be saying, "What's that smell? Was that you? Honey...!?!" And you'll make a face like this:

 
And then you'll realize it's rotten egg stuff that got on your fancy egg carton and you'll throw the caterpillars away after the Shark goes to bed.

Butterfly sandwiches and pretzels

I'm pretty sure I ate an ant this morning. A real ant.

Today we went to the Arboretum for a picnic. We made butterflies out of celery sticks with peanut butter, with pretzels stuck in for wings and raisins for eyes.

 

The Shark calls them "fretzels."

 

Even if your pretzels break, you can make some lopsided butterflies.

 

We also made another version of butterfly sandwiches. Cut the crusts off, cut the sandwich into fourths, and arrange. We used an apple slice as the body. 

If you want antennae, you're going to have to poke holes in the apple with a knife. I crushed the pretzels trying to do it, and I think an ant crawled into my sandwich.

 

Extra credit: find some stickers in a drawer and put them on your sandwich bags. 

the payoff: The Shark looks over at me in the middle of the picnic and says, "What a gweat day!"  It was almost worth eating an ant for.

Butterfly hunt at the Arboretum

We took a picnic to the Dallas Arboretum today and went on a butterfly hunt. 

We saw small white butterflies, and a big black and yellow butterfly. I don't know what kinds of butterflies they were, but we have two butterfly events this weekend where we should learn that sort of thing.

Aren't you glad I didn't include an animated gif of a butterfly right here? Yeah, me too.

 

 These are celery sticks with peanut butter. They don't look like much now, but just you wait.

 

This is cheese. They were sampling it at Central Market last night, and it was really good, so I used it to make the sandwiches. I thought you would want to know.

 

Can you see the butterfly in this picture? It's right next to the...

no...

never mind, I can't see it either. 

 

Our Arboretum is beautiful. I took a picture of this, because I didn't get any pictures of butterflies. Butterflies are fast. By the time you pull your phone out of your pocket, and slide to unlock, and put in your four digit lock code... yeah, that butterfly is outta there.