New Year's Day: A Trip to the Science Museum

Mike & Kristin (avoiding our camera two weeks before Christmas)

Mike & Kristin treated us to a trip to the Science Museum on New Year's day! The trip was especially great because Kaylee has never visited the museum. We had the opportunity to see the Butterfly Garden, where you walk among live butterflies. Did you realize that there's a butterfly called an owl butterfly (shown to the left)? And although they are brownish on the outside, the inside of their wings are a brilliant blue. Pretty cool, right? Kaylee loved the butterflies. She can point out butterflies in her books, but she had never seen a real butterfly (never mind hundreds all at once)!

Later we moseyed over to the Mythic Creatures exhibit, where there was a huge dragon guarding the entrance! Don't worry, we managed to sneak by. I was a little nervous that the dragon would scare Kaylee, but she had the opposite reaction. Her eyes got huge and she started laughing. An odd reaction, but good. We saw all kinds of mythical creatures and suggestions as to how they were created. For example, it was suggested that a Griffin may have been derived from people discovering dinosaur bones before they understood what dinosaurs were. There were also explanations of mythical creature lore. The most surprising for me was the mermaid history. Apparently, mermaids weren't originally good creatures. Their primary purpose was to lure sailors to their death. Hmmm, that's definitely not what mermaids did in Disney's "The Little Mermaid."

Aside from butterflies and mythical creatures, we also saw baby chicks, monkeys, an amazing hologram, a device that measured hand temperature (Mike has hot hands by the way), and sea shells. Here's a short clip of Mike showing Kaylee how to use a magnifying glass to look at sea shells. Very cute.