Still obsessed with dinosaurs

Ethan has been obsessed with dinosaurs for a really long time. I'm inclined to blame that on Taylor. He and I do not share the same opinion on parental censorship of movies especially because he thinks the kids are too young to understand much that they're seeing. This was evident when Ethan was almost 2. Ethan came to lay with us one morning in our bed. I had been gone the evening before working at the Family History Center in DC so I asked him what he had done. He was wearing pajamas with little dinosaurs on them and he proceeded to tell me that he and dad watched dinosaurs and that this one (pointing to the Tyrannosaurus) was eating the car tire and roaring really loud. Jurassic Park maybe??? You let the kid watch a scary PG-13 movie? BUSTED! The kid understood! And several nights in a row after that he woke up with nightmares.
And since then he's been in love with dinosaurs. He was a dragon/dinosaur for Halloween (only because all the dino costumes also had wings), he loves dinosaur puzzles and plastic dinosaur toys and even (gag) Barney. This is one of his favorite books because it has 16 little magnetic dinosaurs to stick on the pages. And since Ethan loves it... so does Isaac.
Up in Ogden there's a dinosaur park and the first Thursday of every month is their free day so last Thursday we headed up. We had to wait until after Ethan's swim class so we brought lunch along to eat in the car and watched Barney on our little DVD player (secretly I'm trying to convince Isaac that TV is a good thing so he'll watch it and sit still in August when I'm 34 weeks pregnant and he's my lap child on the plane. He's still not convinced. Ethan's watching a monkey George movie right now while I blog. Isaac is banging away on a zylophone.)
Since we were going to the dinosaur park I had to make dinosaur cut-out sandwiches. Bonus- it cuts off the crusts for me which neither of my kids will touch. As a side note- Ethan's new favorite lunch is peanut butter and cheese sandwiches. Yep, you heard that right, peanut butter on bread with a slice of American cheese. Yum!

Happily it was an overcast day so the outside walk was quite pleasant. I wasn't sure Isaac would enjoy the trip much but he was really excited to look at all the signs and point to the dinosaurs. You can see a little green one in the trees on the right.

They're pretty impressive statues.

In addition to hundreds of dinosaurs, they have a dino playground which I think is smart since my kids wanted to climb on all the statues. And here they could.

And a park wouldn't be complete without a slide. This one is shaped like a pteradactyl if you look at it from the side. Here you can see Isaac going down backwards. Tragically I didn't realize that he'd slide so fast and that the drop at the end was so far. He literally sailed off the end and landed belly-flop style in the sand. Not too happy about that either.

And the park wouldn't be complete without brushes and dinosaur bones to dig out.

I've decided that Isaac is my quiet child which is kind of fair since Ethan is a little chatter box and has no end to questions he wants answered. Isaac is content to just watch and although he has a vocabulary of 20 or so words, he rarely uses them- and NEVER when prompted. He's just not interested in performing. So I was surprised when we started our walk and I was pointing our dinosaurs and almost immediately he started running ahead on the trail and stopping and pointing and yelling "di" "di" very excitedly. Apparently dinosaur needs to be included in our vocabulary list. Who knew? Here he is in this little movie pointing. This wasn't the best example because he got distracted by the scary dinosaur noises coming from the trees, but it's all I caught on tape.

This one makes me crack up. For all Ethan's telling me that dinosaurs aren't scary because they're not real, inside the museum they have a Tyrannosaurus attacking a family of Triceratops complete with a mother and 2 babies. The puppets don't really move much but the babies make little cries and the mother snorts and the Tyrannosaurus roars and shakes back and forth. Ethan refused to go near him and was very concerned about the babies. It was pretty dark too.