As I’m on vacation this week, we decided to take the kids on a day trip yesterday. As few weeks ago, the Get My Perks website, a Groupon clone, offered a deal for The Butterfly Place, a small family-run butterfly house about an hour away in Westford, MA.
The kids love butterflies, especially Isabella, and she can identify many of the species by name. For her birthday, she received a butterfly-raising kit, which we used to raise some Painted Lady butterflies and then release them. I even made up a bedtime story for her when she was toddler called “Fly away, butterfly.”
So you imagine how entranced she was when we entered the butterfly house and she saw hundreds of butterflies of all shapes and colors and sizes flying around her. It’s not a large building at all, a few hundred square feet, and it contains dozens of butterfly friendly plants strewn among stone paths. And yet it was quite magical at times. Some of the butterflies would flit past your face while others would land just inches away on leaves and flowers.
I even seemed to attract more than my fair share with butterflies spontaneously landing on my hat and arms and legs with no prompting by me. I later realized that as a diabetic there’s a larger than normal amount of sugar in my sweat and that must have been what attracted them.
It doesn’t take long to walk through, but it’s nice to just stand or sit in one place and be entranced by the beautiful, flitting things.
With the Get My Perks deal, we paid $20 for two adults and two kids (three and over), plus an identification guide to the butterflies. Without it, the cost would have been $40, which might have been enough to dissuade us from going, but I’m glad it didn’t. The pure joy on the kids’ faces would have been worth the trip and cost at that price.
