Who's afraid of the big bad....butterfly?

Stephen's been on a kick in the last week or so wanting to learn everything about all kinds of bugs. It started with bees one day. He loved talking about bees so much that the next day we had to do spiders. And then grasshoppers. And then ants. And then butterflies. Let me tell you, this has been a week of riveting education. But he's enjoyed it and he's been excited about it, so who am I to stifle his natural curiosity. So I've found everything I could about whatever creepy crawly he wanted to learn about.

The science museum here has a butterfly center where there are thousands of live butterflies flying around and landing on people and nearby plants. My mom mentioned that it would be fun to take the kids there since Stephen's been so fascinated by bugs. So we loaded them up Saturday and headed in to town to the butterflies. Stephen got his card of the different species and the first few minutes he was so excited about all the different butterflies. We even got to see one land on a flower and drink the nectar. It was so cool. Zachary was fascinated by the hundreds of different species of puddles.

At one point, a guy next to us had a butterfly on his hand. Stephen couldn't take his eyes off of it and the guy asked if Stephen wanted to hold it. He did and they guy transferred the butterfly (which happened to be a Blue Morpho, Stephen's favorite from Diego) to Stephen's hand. We got lots of pictures and Stephen was getting lots of attention. He then turned to me to ask how long the butterfly was going to sit on his hand. Before I could get one syllable of an answer out, he lost all calm and composure he had and f r e a k e d out. If you came from another planet and didn't know one single thing about our gentle friend, the butterfly, from watching Stephen's reaction to one sitting on his hand, you would think that butterflies are deceptively beautiful and that they are actually tiny terrorists that suck all the blood from our children and replace it with toxins that make them crazy.

He then flipped out every time a butterfly looked like it was thinking about even flying anywhere near him. And Zachary, being the little monkey see, monkey do brother that he is, proceeded to do the exact same thing (unless there was a puddle that needed to be set straight).

The entomology portion of his curiosity has now passed.

And I'm so disappointed.