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Website: http://www.ncmls.org/

Location: 433 Murray Avenue, Durham, NC 27704

Phone: (919) 220-5429

The cafe is OPEN with food provided by Grayson's Cafe.

Butterfly Bash
The Butterfly Bash was a great time. Although the day started overcast, it did not ruin our fun. On the way in, we snapped a few shots of the kites exhibit. The kites exhibit is not hands-on, but it's a pleasant exhibit. Pretty kites.

We signed up for the make-a-costume with the Scrap Exchange. While waiting, we visited the snakes. Those guys are very active first thing in the morning. It was a treat to see them squirming around and smelling the air with their tongues. We got very worried about a trout stuck in the stream between the two fish pools, but a museum worker told us that was normal behavior for a trout.

At 11:00, we headed into the Mercury Meeting Room to make the bug costume. The Scrap Exchange people are so nice! The bins were full of creative supplies, and we got to work on a Centipede costume (above). Most of the kids were making butterfly wings with wire hangers, pantyhose streteched across the hangers, and all kinds of glittery and colorful add-ons. An army of teenaged museum volunteers was on hand to help. We had to leave before the costume parade, but we saw it last year, and it was cute.

Lunch was tuna wrap, hamburger, fruit salad, and chips, provided by the new food vendor, Grayson's Cafe. The kids meals are $5.95, a bit pricier than McDonald's, of course, but it's a good quality meal. The burger was real; the roll was a nice heft of bread, not a doughy white pouf; the fruit salad was big enough for three of us to share; and the drink was bottomless.

Afterwards, we chalked in a butterfly as an entry into the contest, while listening to music from A Different Drum (which that day reminded me of the Gipsy Kings). Red ants attacked my son's shoes, so we itched our way back to the car, stopping only quickly into the museum shop for a birthday present (members get 10% off).

Displayed in Grayson's Cafe was work by yogachicken.com. I'd love to see more of this artist's work. Very humorous portrayals of animals.

A fun day, and we'll be back next year!

LEMURS!
The lemurs, wolves, and bears exhibits are open and FUN! You can see the lemurs very close-up running around in their play area, or you can use a camera there to zoom in close. Aren't they cute!?

And coming soon... Dinosaur Park, again!

Birthday Parties
Birthday parties at the Museum of Life and Science! The birthday parties have always been fun (we went to about six last year) and now the experience is even more encompassing: balloons, music, games... the Dinosaur theme has a fossil dig outside and the Butterfly theme is in the Magic Wings Butterfly House in a room painted with bugs inside.

This is a real space capsule; the kids can spend hours in this thing pretending to fly to Mars.

Drums and other percussion instruments outdoors for young and old

If you join the NCMLS, you can get in these other places in North Carolina free!
Catawba Science Center, Hickory LINK
Discovery Place, Charlotte LINK
Nature Center, Asheville LINK
Health Adventure, Asheville LINK
Imagination Station, Wilson LINK
Greensboro Science Center, Greensboro LINK
NC Transportation Museum, Spencer LINK
Rocky Mount Children's Museum, Rocky Mount LINK
Schiele Museum of Natural History and Planetarium, Gastonia LINK
SciWorks, Winston-Salem LINK