Our First Official Field Trip!

Last week was Monarch Week at the Botanica Gardens in Wichita. So we met up with some other homeschool moms and kids for a field trip. We got rained on some of the time, but that's okay. We didn't melt!

We saw lots of beautiful gardens. As you can imagine, the water features were most popular with the Preschool/Kindergarten crowd.
We went into the Butterfly House and you could almost see the volunteers cringe as we came piling in. And at that point there were only 2 moms and 7 kids(8 if you count the one in utero)! After they could see that our kids weren't going to run all over and climb on everything, stomping on butterflies and destroying things, they got interested in the kids. (Luckily we went there almost the first thing, so they hadn't turned into hooligans yet. :) ) This lady told the kids all about butterflies and we looked at an exhibit showing them in various stages from cocoon to a new butterfly clinging to a cocoon waiting for its wings to dry. Then she let the kids hold a butterfly, which they were thrilled about.
Dominic is proud to be holding a butterfly:

Catherine gets a turn. She said it tickled when the butterfly walked on her fingers. Anne and Joseph were a little too scared to hold one, though.

Just as exciting was the Monarch Butterfly tagging demonstration. The volunteers had caught some monarch butterflies and then each family there in turn got to watch "their" butterfly be tagged and then released. So we have a butterfly flying around out there somewhere. In the spring we'll be able to get online and see if our butterfly has been tracked anywhere down south in Mexico, where they migrate.

A successful first field trip!