Dinosaur Safari Recap PsIP

Butterflie6381 · July 2010

Saturday was Dinosaur Day on Playhouse Disney. Lil Miss loves the Imagination Movers and Dance-A-Lot Robot, so I decide to take the theme and turn into a whole day with a backyard safari.

It went really well and we all had a lot of fun. Plus, it was pretty easy to do. We started with a picnic breakfast in the bedroom while watching cartoons and eating Brontosaurus bacon and TRex-riffic French toast. (DH offered to make me breakfast in bed.) Then while he set up the back yard, we did the dinosaur dance and got dressed. Lil Miss discovered the safari case on the dining room table right away, and we opened it up, showing her the map and all the tools we would need for the day. It was all simple stuff, magnifying glasses from the $1 store (for catching lightning bugs - or dinosaurs) paint brushes & shovels for digging up fossils, binoculars, the map and stickers to mark where we found the dinos, a 'magic' watch and compass, a 'satellite' phone, and a flashlight in a plastic case.

DH & I made 'fossils' the night before with cookie cutters (found on clearance!) and playdoh. They aren't anything Martha would showcase, but they did trick. We put them in some sand in a big tupperware container.

The "Egg Nest" was a plastic bowl with a few Easter Eggs filled with dinos and rocks from the garden.

I printed out some dino coloring pages and we taped them up in Penny's doghouse -- they became cave drawings in the woolly mammoth's cave. Lil Miss recently discovered flashlights and is fascinated by them, so this part was especially fun. Oh, and I got a special kick out of seeing DH in the dog house (and made so many jokes about him belonging there!)

Then we hid little plastic dinosaurs in pairs around the yard to find. the hardest part was finding dinosaurs in the store. Would you believe the lady at AC Moore told me she couldn't help me becasue she 'had a daughter and dinosaurs are for boys." She then tried to sell me lizzard beanie babies. ::::eyeroll:::: We started at the deck and ended at the pool. By the end, you could see how excited Lil Miss was to find more dinosaurs. She has gone to play with her safari case every day since.

It was really great and its something we plan to do again in the future. There are a lot of dinosaur crafts/toys out there, but they are for older kids, so I have lots of ideas for the future!