George S. Eccles Dinosaur Park: Playground

As we sat resting on the bench, the phone rang. It was Tom's mom. We all know how much Tom's mom LOVES to talk, so we figured we were in for a long wait.


Fortunately I spotted one of the last things the kids wanted to do at the park . . . go on the pteranadon slide. They watch a show on PBS called Dinosaur Train that features a pteranadon family, so they were eager to go on the pteranadon slide while we were here. With Tom talking to his mom and me taking care of Declan, the girls headed over to go slide.



Shelby and Taylor zipped on down, but Payden needed some encouragement from Madison to finally get up enough courage to slide down.


Meanwhile, I set Declan down in the grass. He is not a fan of the feel of grass and immediately started squirming around trying to get his legs off the ground to get away from the grass.


Now I've learned that because he HATES walking, putting him in the grass is a good thing because he's more willing to walk to get away from being touched by the grass. Of course, he still HATES walking, and so the moment Madison picked him up to help him walk he did what he always does . . .


drop his weight to try and get out of walking. Little punk! That's why he still isn't walking at 13 months . . . he hates being made to walk. Fortunately, as I knew he would, he hated the grass so much that he decided it was worth walking.


At about this point, I noticed the girls had disappeared. They'd been playing in a play area with a huge fake dinosaur bone. I walked over and found them hiding inside.


Of course Ryan, being the boy that he is, couldn't resist hoping up on top to act like he'd conquered the dinosaur.


Declan had finally gotten free of Madison and the grass and was crawling away as fast he could.


I convinced the kids to come play on the playground nearer to where Tom and I were sitting.


I snatched Declan up, so he could play with his sisters. He loved the sand. He would pick it up in his cute chubby hand, lift his hand in the air, and let the sand fall out. He loved doing this over and over again. He eventually decided throwing it up in the air was fun, too.



At this point, Taylor was still pretending to be a dinosaur (you can tell by the way she's holding her hands). She LOVES dinosaurs and LOVES pretending to be animals and dinosaurs and such.


Shelby let Ryan bury her in the sand and absolutely LOVED it, which is surprising because she used to completely freak out whenever she would touch sand.


Madison just chilled on top of the dinosaur statue.





If you look closely, you can see the sand that he tossed through the air. Of course Payden was very excited to help him throw sand around and had fun dumping it on his head as well.


After lots of playing and lots of talking (on Tom's part), we were finally done and ready to go.


It was well worth the drive. We had so much fun seeing all of the exhibits and walking around outside. We'll have to do it again next summer!