Today was $2 Tuesday at Thanksgiving Point. We've been promising Marshy for months that we'd go to the Dinosaur Museum there, which he LOVES, but have always put it off because it costs us $30 to take our whole family (all 3 of us).
I figured today would be a good day because it was the first day of school everywhere. No one will be at the museum on the first day of school, right?
WRONG!
The place was PACKED. Literally. Stay at home moms and dads with their little kids, some too little to fully appreciate the awesomeness of the dinosaur museum (like, 3-months-old-and-sleeping-in-the-car-seat-in-the-HUGE-stroller-that-nearly-ran-us-over-a-couple-of-times too young).
We waited for nearly 10 minutes just to pay to get in. That should have been my first sign that this day was going to suck. They were also doing oatmeal taste testing if you filled out a survey. What? Seriously? Oatmeal? Yuck! And it was totally slowing down the progression of the line. Tired of standing there, we pressed forward. Then the taste testers approached me.
Her: Would you like to take a survey and try three different kinds of oatmeal today?
Me: No. We just want to get into the museum.
Her: Oh, okay then, go right ahead.
She lets us through....ahead of the three groups of people doing the survey. They glare at me, but it's their own fault they can't go any further. They volunteered to do the oatmeal thing, not me! haha
We pay our $4 (remember, $2/per person today) and enter the museum. We can barely move the tiny exhibit rooms are so packed with people and screaming kids and GIANT strollers with NO kids in them. If you're not going to put your kid in the stroller, leave it outside people!
We wind our way through the rooms until we get to the fun part: the dinosaur bones and activity centers. Marshy has been looking forward to playing on the erosion table for almost a year. He loves it! There's sand and water and you can watch how erosion works while playing with plastic dinosaurs and palm trees and building mountains and valleys, etc. It's a lot of fun.
To get to the erosion table, you have to walk past the "design a dinosaur" station. It's a large, carpet covered figure. On the walls are pieces: heads, horns, noses, spikes, tails, etc. that you can attach with velcro to build your own dinsoaur. It's so crowded we barely push through. That's a bad sign, cuz it's by far the lamest activity there.
As we approach the erosion table there are so many people that I'm sure the fire marshal would've freaked out. Kids are standing reaching over the tops of one another to play in the water. Marshy wants to play, but I can barely see him next to me (and he's holding my hand!) so I tell him maybe next time, there's too many kids playing in the water right now. He sighs and shuffles out of the room with me.
We battle our way through the museum to the next fun activity: digging for dinosaur bones in the sand. Again, so many kids and parents and shoes and socks and strollers all over the place that there's no way he would ever have gotten to dig. It makes me sad. It makes him sad, too. I offer to take him to the gift shop and buy him a consolation prize. He gets happier. He picks the biggest dinosaur he can find in our price range and is so happy! That makes the day a little better. We were only in there for maybe 40 minutes. It's a good thing we only paid $4. I would've been pissed if I'd paid full price.
Then we get lunch at McDonald's. The Happy Meal toys are superheroes. Today's toy? Aquaman. LAME. As we're driving through the bank, Marshy says, "Look mom!" I look back to find this:
"T-REX IS EATING AQUAMAN MOMMY!"
And that, I have decided, is why I bother.
