Yesterday we celebrated Father's Day with Pete's parents. They had wanted to take the kids on the train to Kenosha to a dinosaur museum they had heard of. After getting off the train to a sudden downpour, we walked in a bit of rain, but then dried off in the museum and ate the Subway sandwiches we had taken along. The museum was mostly one big room of bones and then a basement area with some kids activities and a working paleontology room which is affiliated with the local college.
Here are the kids doing a dinosaur dig. There was a really helpful guy down there who was happy to answer a lot of our questions. He told the kids that this fossil formation that they were digging up was a replica of a real pair of dinosaurs that had been found in a fighting position. Henry had actually read about this fossil, so it was pretty cool for him to get to 'work' on it.
Here was a real bone they got to touch. It was inside the special kind of cast they put them in in the field when they dig them up. I guess this is so they can be transported without falling apart.
We took the outside picture after we were done in the museum, because on our way in it was still pretty rainy.
After the museum we walked around Kenosha a bit. We saw some cool stuff in the Kenosha Public museum as well. Later we had a delicious dinner at a local Italian restaurant. This photo was taken by a very enthusiastic museum volunteer.
This morning we tried to celebrate Pete in style. He didn't sleep in long enough for us to get him breakfast in bed, but we did have a nice breakfast never-the-less. You can still see some chocolate on the kids' faces from the chocolate babka buns I made.
After breakfast we drove down to Oakton to a fun mini-golf spot. We were there early before the day heated up too much.
We aren't exactly a family of golfers, but we had a pretty good time. I'm still trying to work out uploading video from our new small camera. We got some good footage of Clara's put-put style and some of a typical Henry-Clara squabble.
After mini-golf Pete wanted to go down into the city to check out a drum store he knew of but hadn't been to yet. He was pretty happy browsing this wall of sticks and picked out a couple new sets for himself.
We were close to a restaurant we had driven past before with the kids- The Twisted Spoke. They liked the rotating skeleton on the motorcycle, so we decided to stop there for lunch. It was sort of a biker bar, with the bathrooms classily labeled "chicks" and "dicks". We sat on the rooftop deck, which got pretty hot after a bit, so we were all fairly worn out by the time we got home. We had some nap and rest time and now we're letting the kids watch a movie.
I hope Pete had a fun father's day weekend. He certainly deserves it for being such a good Dad!
