05 April 2006

Tuesday Teatime

Our big discovery: the Butterfly House is free admission the first Tuesday of the month from 9 to 11a.m.

I printed out a page of Caterpillar/Butterfly poems from CanTeach, and we headed on over. I'd never been to a butterfly house before. It was fun. It was a sunny day, and a lot of the butterflies were active.

KidV1 had a theory that if she kept her hand near a butterfly long enough the butterfly would eventually crawl onto her hand. It didn't work out quite as planned; since she was standing still for so long, butterflies began landing on her. None ever crawled onto her hand, though.



We sat on benches in the house, and I read a few of the poems. I realized after we got there that most were about caterpillars, eggs, cocoons and all -- very little about actual butterflies.

We hit up the gift shop on the way out, and made up for our free admission by buying stuff there. What's a teatime without some sort of snack? We bought a box of Buttery Cinnamon Butterfly Shortbread Cookies . After we paid and headed out of the shop we discovered the display of candy-coated insects. My kids are so lucky we found that display after we paid, as I'm always intrigued by the idea of eating insects, and would've bought those instead.

It turned out the new playground in this particular park had just opened up, so the kids decided we needed to try it out. This would've been okay if I had some knitting, but as it was I just sat there in the sun and fantasized about what sort of socks I would knit if I owned this yarn .

Home for lunch (Moms with more forethought had packed lunches to have at the park picnic benches, and made an entire morning out of the Butterfly House, the new playground, and other park attractions; honestly, I felt like crap and was impressed that I was remaining upright during this whole adventure).

We continued Teatime at home, where I found a couple of decent poems. We went up to the top of the playset, high in the air like the butterflies. We took along our cookies, our drinks (Trader Joe's Strawberry Kiwi, served in sippy cups with bendy straws; the butterflies had been served some sort of red liquid, and the bendy straw echoed the proboscis). I read William Wordsworth's To a Butterfly. Then KidV1 and I read Chrysalis Diary from Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices . We had never done that type of poem before, and it was fun.

The cookies were great, by the way. We highly recommend them for a butterfly-themed teatime.

No comments: