Dinosaur Bones and Ferris Wheels

For our date day today, I asked Joshua what he wanted to eat, and he said tacos.  He remembered that we had previously had tacos on a date day and that that would be fun to do again.  Although we went to Taco John's last time, this time we went to Taco Bell, which in my opinion is better in every way.  Because Taco Bell is the best fast food restaurant on the planet.  He chowed down on a lot of food before we made our way to our next stop.

This morning when I asked him what he wanted to do for our date day, and he said he wanted to see dinosaur bones and go on a Ferris wheel.  There were two random and seemingly unattainable goals, until I realized I could actually make both of them happen!  First, we went to the Museum at Prairiefire in Overland Park, which I knew actually had dinosaur bones (or at least replica ones).  First we went to one of the digital boards where you can learn about dinosaurs and then design one, such as by choosing their skintone (since nobody knows what they actually looked like).  Joshua chose an iguanodon, and correctly answered in the on-screen trivia question that the iguanodon ate plants, not meat or fish.  Nonetheless, when it came time to name his iguanodon, he said he wanted to name it Fishbiter.  I said, "Fishbiter?"  He said, "Yeah, like someone who bites fish."  I said, "But we just decided that this dinosaur didn't eat fish."  He replied with, "Yeah, I know.  But I just want to name him Fishbiter."  Alright then.  Fishbiter it is.  Here you can see Joshua at the design screen and then a rendering of Fishbiter the Iguanodon.



When you walk into the main lobby area, there is a giant screen that projects a live video feed of the lobby area, including all the people standing in it.  They then overlay it with digital renderings of dinosaurs (and dragons, apparently), but they use the ones designed in the other room.  It's a pretty cool effect, as it looks like the creatures are moving among you, potentially stepping on you or breathing fire on you.  After a couple minutes we did in fact see our new poorly-named friend Fishbiter ambling through and around us, going about his busy day of not biting fish.

They have a t-rex skeleton (a re-casting based on actual excavated bones) in the lobby, which Joshua thought was awesome.  And with that, we achieved our first goal: we saw dinosaur bones.

Everything we had done so far was free, but they have a discovery room that charges a small fee, but I thought it would be worth it.  He got to use brushes and chisels to uncover bones in a sand pit, and then do a puzzle using the metatarsals of a dinosaur.

They had an exhibit on historical masks.  Joshua didn't love this, probably because it's not necessarily as fun to wear a mask as it is to look at someone wearing them, but I had him do it anyway, and I then showed him the pictures afterward.  My favorite was the gold theater mask, but he liked the white one the best.  He laughed and said he looked like Old Man Fookwire, one of his favorite book characters.

There were a lot of insect-based exhibits, including some gigantic bugs.

There was a live bearded dragon, who looked like he thought he was pretty tough.

And he even got to hold a Madagascar hissing cockroach, which he thought was great.

The building is somewhat famous locally for its pretty stained glass exterior.  He we are in front of it.  It was a cloudy day today, so it wasn't as bright as it normally is.

We saw dinosaur bones, but that still left us one item short of our goal.  Where would we find a Ferris wheel in January?  At Scheels, the new sporting goods store.  I'd heard of Scheels from my childhood, as there were some in Iowa, but until recently there were none around here.  But now there's a new one, and its trademark attribute is that in addition to being a massive sporting goods store, it has a 65-foot high Ferris wheel.  It's $1 to ride it, and that's exactly what we did.  I tried to recreate one of my favorite pictures with Joshua that I took at Old Settlers Day last year, with only marginal results.  Oh well.  That wasn't the point.  The point was to find a Ferris wheel, and we did it!

It was another awesome date day, and it was extra fun in a way because as of early this morning I had no plan whatsoever, and based on two seemingly impossible requests from Joshua, we ended up with a really fun day together.