Butterflies and dinosaurs

Since we are new to living in the Denver area and I'm home with the girls full time (for now), we are trying to see some of our local sites.  Joker is even able to take the week off so that we can adventure together - yesterday we visited with family, today we went to the Butterfly Pavilion in Denver, tomorrow we're taking the narrow gauge railroad between Georgetown and Silver Plume, and we're going camping this weekend with my parents.  I hope to have lots of pictures to share from our Colorado fun week!

The Butterfly Pavilion is pretty amazing.  The first rooms are filled with tanks that house spiders (including an entire "tarantula tower"), scorpions (some that glow in the dark), beetles, walking sticks, millipedes, a beehive, roaches and more.  Creepy.  But pretty cool.  Then you enter the rainforest environment, which is the main attraction.  Here, thousands of butterflies are flitting and sitting and eating... they're all over the place, all sizes and colors.  Total wow.

A couple of weeks ago, I took the girls to the Morrison Natural History Museum.  It's basically in our back yard, and the Bug has recently become very interested in dinosaurs.  The museum is tiny, but has some amazing fossils and casts - the first Stegosaurus and Apatosaurus (which was still a Brontosaurus when I was a kid) discovered in Colorado, T-Rex, Pteranodon, mammoth, saber tooth cat and more.  The highlight for the girls, though, was the fossil dig pit outside, where kids can find real fossils in the sand.