Today, on a whim, I decided to take the kids to The Butterfly House.  It's at a Saint Louis county park and it's a butterfly conservatory.  I've heard so many good things about it and how pretty it can be and since this month is 'March Morphos' we had to check it out.  March Morphos is a special time at the butterfly house in which the blue morphos butterfly hatches from it's gross little chrysalis thingie and flies all about the conservatory.  Such a beautiful, stunning butterfly.  It's really a sight to be seen.

Now, even though the weather was calling for a sunny 80 degree day it is of course pouring rain when we get to the park so we wait in the parking lot to wait it out for 10 minutes which was an eternity for a 2 year old.

So we get there and are looking at all the insect and spider displays in the museum. Oh joy!  A hissing cockroach display!  Hundreds of them in a huge Plexiglas display!  Some of them are placid and calm while others are running around, trying to escape their enclosure, crawling over each other in a frantic way and I'm plastered against the wall as far away from it I can get and still keep an eye on Henry.  Suddenly I am remembering just how real my fear of insects is.  Ohhhh boy.

Henry is done looking at the roaches, thank God.  Now we can go look at the pretty, pretty, effing majestic butterflies.  Except I forgot how non-discriminatory my fear of insects is, even the pretty, colorful, sparkly ones.  Yes, I'm even afraid of butterflies especially when they are flying around by the hundreds and landing on me.  I don't know if it was the tropical heat, the nervousness of making sure I didn't lose Henry in the crowd and also making sure we didn't step on any butterflies on the ground but at this point I am just trying to keep it all together.  Apparently Henry sensed my nervousness and he became frightened by the butterflies and insisted on being picked up.  So there I am in a hot and crowded indoor observatory carrying a clinging to my body 32 pound child and pushing an 8 month old down in a stroller down a stony path (read: I needed both hands which I did NOT have) trying to find a flipping exit because my boy is now yelling, "I wanna go home!  Fruit snacks!!  FRUIT SNACKS!" and since people are there to take photos of the beautiful and peaceful butterflies I am getting the stink eye from some of them.  Don't forget about the crushing a butterfly on the ground paranoia.  DON'T STEP ON THE BUTTERFLIES!!

But wait, there is more!

As we're walking out to the car I see that, yay (!) there is a really nice playground we can play on before going home.  We walk towards that instead of the car and it starts pouring on us.  Not sprinkling - raining hard.  Poor Lucy is alarmed and starts crying, I'm trying to get Henry on the path to the car and he's very upset that all the sudden he has to get in the car and not play on the playground so he's definitely not cooperating.  Finally we make it to the car, I load everyone up in their car seats and buckle them in, get my soaking wet self in the car and it's raining so hard I decide to wait it out for a while before we get on the highway.  So I feed Lucy her bottle, then she poops so I have to get back out of the car, in the rain, to give her a diaper change because I'm not about to let her sit in poop for the half hour ride home.  Finally we start our sad car ride home, in the pouring rain.

Eh, you win some, you lose some and I just can't stop laughing at this epic (failure?) adventure of the day.