Butterflies and Dinosaurs

It's practically been a nature preserve around here for the past few weeks. For her birthday, Maddy got a cup of caterpillars. One of our friends at DBU gave it to her. The caterpillars come in a plastic dixie cup kind of thing with a lid. The lid is covered with a thin paper on the inside. The cup comes with enough food to feed the caterpillars until they form a chrysalis. The crawl to the top of the cup and attach themselves in their chrysalis to the paper on the lid. When all the caterpillars have done this, you remove the paper with the chrysalises and attach it with a pin the side of a butterfly habitat. After a few days, the butterflies emerge inside the habitat. Maddy loves watching the butterflies. She checked on them every day. She named them Hermie, Snail-y, Mickey Mouse, and Minnie Mouse. One of Aaron's students raises butterflies so she told us about some ways to get pics of Maddy holding a butterfly without the butterfly flying away. We had a coupon for 5 more caterpillars, so Aaron ordered himself....I mean Maddy...more caterpillars so we will get to do it one more time.

We had butterfly release day on Friday. Maddy really enjoyed that part too.

This Saturday we decided to take a trip to Dinosaur Valley State Park in Glen Rose and use our Texas State Park pass. I don't know why we didn't get one of these passes earlier. There really are a lot of neat state parks around the area. We got on when we went camping at Cedar Hill State Park in March. Cedar Hill is about 5 minutes from DBU. They have a really nice campground around Joe Pool Lake. I have to say that the morning of that camping trip was the coldest breakfast I have ever had camping. It was miserable, but at least we got the park pass out of it. Anyhow, Dinosaur Valley is about 2 hours southwest of us so we packed a picnic lunch and planned to spend the afternoon. Maddy loved having a picnic. She wanted to eat on the ground, not a table.

The park has these plastic dinosaur models right as you enter the park. Maddy knew they were fake but she did not want to turn her back on the dinosaurs. Just in case.

They had good, fairly even hiking trails along the river. This is where we had to go to see all the Dinosaur footprints. We also had fun wading in the creek. Maddy way over-estimated the depth of the water.

We also hiked up to a scenic overlook that looked out over the entire park.

Dinosaur foot print! The meat eating kind. Upper left corner.

We think this was the footprint of the plant eater that was in the area. Not 100% sure because there wasn't really anyone or a sign or anything that said this was it. The plant eater footprints were harder to distinguish. It probably would have also helped us spot more footprints if we would have read the sign about what the footprints looked like, where they were located, etc. before we did the entire loop around the track sites. Oh well. If we go back I guess we will know more the next time.

What is this? Well according to Maddy, it was a snake. We assured her that it was just moss and not alive. Later she told Aaron, pointing to another piece of moss, "That's my favorite kind of snake. The dead kind." I think her great uncle Eldon would be proud.

Maddy took wading to the next level. She decided to go "swimming". This activity consisted of crawl-wallowing through the shallow waters of the creek. I let her since I follow the boy scout motto when going somewhere with a kid and had a change of clothes in the car.