Dinosaur Summer

We love dinosaurs around here, did you know? My kiddos' obsession colors every aspect of our days together, from the big, such as the little kid's AWESOME picture of a dinosaur that she drew yesterday--

--to the small: see the dinos on the big kid's jammies?

We've got some awesome dino-lovin' activities planned for this summer. We'll be practically in the front row for the Walking With Dinosaurs Live show when it comes near us in July (we're having to forgo our traditional huge summer birthday bash to afford the tickets, which are OUTRAGEOUS, but it's going to be worth the budget re-allocation, I know), and do not worry, I've already mapped out the locations of the dinosaur museums that we can visit on our June trip to Wisconsin--the Milwaukee Public Museum, the Dinosaur Discovery Museum in Kenosha, and the Field Museum in Chicago, likely. Wisconsin is light on dinosaur museums because it doesn't have a fossil history because dinosaurs never lived there because it was covered in water during prehistoric times; this is what you get to learn when your children are obsessed with dinosaurs.

We'll also have the time and the nice weather to do some other dino activities that require more time than the big kid's three-hour daily preschool would allow (three hours doesn't seem that long while I'm living it, but I have to plan my whole damn day around it!). Whenever we can wrangle my partner (I'm begging him to ask for flex-time at work this summer. I really want him to work four ten-hour days instead of five eight-hour days, and since he's a designer, he actually could use the extra time at work in the evenings, no phone calls, no visitors to his cubby, to focus on his designs), we're going to make measurements on the basketball court over at our neighborhood park and then draw life-size dinosaurs in chalk (this Smithsonian handbook on dinosaurs is our most precious family resource!), and I also want to score a load of helium balloons on some calm day and use them to measure out dinosaur heights in the park--ooh, I'll also need a lot of string.

We go creek-stomping around here a lot, and the kids enjoy searching for geodes and crinoid fossils (the big kid claims that she is "the best fossil hunter out of all my friends," and I have to say that it's probably true), so depending on how interested they are, it would be fun to add on more of that into our dino activities. Where we live in Indiana is actually a superb place to explore for fossils--a shallow prehistoric sea left lots of little ocean critter fossils, and a glacier later on the same site kept the bedrock from being too covered with subsequent layers of earth, so now you can easily fossil hunt (where it's legal) in most creeks, road cuts, and limestone quarries (but not caves! All the Indiana caves and sinkholes are closed to the public this year in hopes of stopping White Nose Syndrome from spreading. Sucks).

Perhaps we could even find a brachoid!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!