A Butterfly Wonderland

Oh man, I got these pictures all loaded here like a week ago, but I finally just got around to finishing this post.  

Anyway, last weekend we made it over to the Desert Botanical Garden to check out the Butterfly Pavilion with Aiden (we did this 2 years ago when I was newly pregnant with Aiden - HERE).  We were excited b/c our library has Culture Passes and we were able to get the one for 2 free admissions to the gardens (normally it would cost us $18 each!)  We only had to pay the $3.50 to get into the Butterfly Pavilion :)

Definitely the majority of the butterflies in there were Zebra Longwings.

The guide to figuring out each of the butterflies.

This one was my favorite - the Queen butterfly.

Just so pretty :)

A Julia butterfly.

We thought Aiden would really enjoy seeing the butterflies flittering around, but he didn't seem too into it :/  Trent mentioned it was too bad this wasn't a dog pavilion b/c Aiden would've eaten it right up!

A Pipevine Swallowtail.

This is probably my favorite picture I got of the butterflies.  A beautiful White Peacock!

How many Zebra Longwings can you spot??  Crazy, huh?!

Another Julia.

Trent loved this red plant.

A Buckeye (on the left) and a Julia.

That's it for the Butterfly Pavilion.  We walked through the gardens some afterward.

Love the little purple wildflowers.

I thought these looked like octupuses..haha.

Normally Aiden wants to run all over the place, so we decided not to bring the stroller, but this day he only wanted to be held :/  I think it had something to do with the heat.

A nice man took several pictures for us.  Here are just a few :)

The next ones are funny b/c Trent and I seem to be doing the same thing in them without realizing it..haha.

Again...

and again!

Loved seeing some of the blossoming cacti.

I thought this final plant looked like a stalk of asparagus..ha. Apparently it's called a Centurian b/c it only blossoms once in a 100 year timeframe.

We stopped for a few minutes in the shade before heading back out to our car.  Aiden was pooped!

If any of you have a butterfly exhibit around, I'd definitely recommend you go check it out.  It's so fun to try to capture them on camera :)