{this photo has nothing at all to do with Dinosaurs but I am going to post one of each of my favorite blue bonnet pictures until they are gone, darnit}

One of the coolest advantages of homeschooling is that we get to steal away in the middle of the week to do things that the masses flood to over the weekend, usually for much cheaper.

Walking with Dinosaurs is touring here right now and we just had to go. My boys are all dinosaur fanatics. When Dalton was 5, he knew more dinosaurs than anyone I knew. When Teegan was 2 & 3, he could barely talk but he could name dinosaurs by looking at their skull bones alone. Eventually they fell out of interest but in the last year or so they’ve sort of jumped back into it all in some collegiate level that I can hardly follow most of the time. So it was fun for all of us to go check out the animatronic dinosaur show.

We scored some really good tickets - 3rd row - for the “student” rate of $18.50 a ticket instead of the outrageous $50+ ticket price. See what I mean? Homeschooling pays for itself, right?!

Let me just say that it did NOT start out well. I think every kid under six in the entire place was horrified. One mother in our row had to leave with her son immediately becuase he was inconsolably terrified. Several kids surrounding us, including Addison, kept their hands over their ears pretty much the entire show. But it opened with some adorable little eggs hatching tiny cute babies who were then RIPPED out and DANGLED into the mouth of a carnivorous predator before being swallowed alive.  Gosh - easing into that kind of drama might have been nice!

That was about as bad as it got but there was a lot of ominous LOUD music and ominous LOUD sound effects and ominous lighting. Addison actually didn’t mind the huge horrifying dinosaurs or their loud and vicious growls. She WAS very sensitive to the change in tone of voice of the storyteller, the change in music and lighting. She is probably not going to be a horror flick fan!

Noah spent a large chunk of the show, off and on, burying his face in our laps. He was not a fan of the fighting dinosaurs. No amount of telling himself that they were just robots seemed to help. He was just freaked.  But afterward he said he had a really good time. My bigger two boys had an awesome time, they totally loved every minute of it, even Teegan who had been completely adamantly opposed to going with us.  I’m so glad we went.

Addy, like I said, either covered her own ears are made US cover her ears for her while she sucked her thumb and peaked out at the show from under our arms! It really didn’t seem like she had much fun but she has talked about it all day. At dinner she spontaneously said “I had fun chocolate” which after some further back and forth that involved her wildly saying “Baby!” and “Growl” and various other words to describe the show, we deciphered to mean “I had fun dinosaurs”.  I asked her if that was what she meant and she said “Yeah! I had fun chocolate! It cool! Baby!”. She really REALLY liked the eggs (prior to the carnivorous homicide) and the baby dinos and the mama/baby love scenes

So it was totally worth the $18.50/ticket if it comes on tour near you. Probably not worth the $50/ticket unless your kid is REALLY into dinosaurs and over the age of 5!

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 7:07 pm and is filed under Homeschooling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.