She's Crafty

Fun at the Dino Museum and growing our very own Prehistoric Creature

Last weekend when my family was visiting for Lila's birthday we took a trip to the Dinosaur Museum at Thanksgiving Point. Every August Mark's work gives him a booklet of free tickets to various places throughout the Salt Lake Valley and The Dinosaur Museum is one of those places. It has become tradition to take a trip down there every August, this year being our third year.

My boys have been enthralled by dinosaurs the last couple years so we always have a great time during our visit. Here is a picture of Andy growling up at the Utah Raptor.

The water exhibit is our favorite where the kids can look through the sand for plastic dinosaurs or build their own dinosaur displays with the sand and dinos. We also always spend lots of time at the end of the museum in the sand room where they use paint brushes to try to uncover dinosaur bones.

Here is Luke and Andy playing in the water with my niece Evalynn. If you didn't know she was my niece you would probably pass her as one of my children, especially with her curly red hair. Her and Luke are pretty much little twins. It's so cute!


My siblings are my best friends so I love every minute I get with them! Here is our group, minus Britney, who so kindly agreed to take this picture of us. I don't know why we didn't ask someone else to take a picture so she was in there. Silly me!

We have also been having lots of prehistoric fun at the home front growing Triops. Have you heard of them? They are relatives to the the ancient Trilobite who was around even before the dinosaurs roamed the Earth. I'm not exactly sure how old the eggs are that they provide you with, but these creatures really do resemble a Trilobite so my kids really feel like they have a prehistoric creature. We picked up this fun activity for about $10.


We started out with 16 eggs in our little dish and even though 3 hatched, only 1 survived. They were so tiny you had to use a magnifying glass to get a decent look at them. This is a picture of our hatched Triop at a couple days old.


Andy has watched him grow day after day and up until about day 21 he pretty much doubled in size every day. Every couple days he still sheds his skin and the kids get pretty amazed by it every time.


Here is a look of the underside of him. I keep wondering if he would bite me if I stuck my finger in there and how bad it would hurt. (Don't worry, I won't try it! LOL!)


Since I have pretty much been his caretaker, it's going to be weird waking up one morning and having the little guy up in Triops heaven. It's been a fun activity for the kids. A MUST DO if you have kids who love prehistoric creatures.

So I was looking through my pictures for this post and saw this picture I forgot to post a couple weeks ago. We had a massive rain storm and within 5 minutes our gutters were overflowing with water. It was a pretty cool site to see. Mark went out to take a look and I caught a picture of of him.


One of my favorite memories this week has been watching Lila play in her little rocking chair. I found it at a garage sale for $5 a month ago and it's been sitting in our living room. At first she wasn't interested in it, but this past week it has been her favorite place to hang out. She loves to climb up in it and try to make it rock, even though her legs don't even touch the ground. I have plans on figuring out how to make a slipcover for it so it will match her room decor.