Well it's hard to believe but Monkey #1 is now five!

It was a very dinosaur birthday for her, but more on that later when you see the pictures.

Of course the day when we have an outdoor activity planned for the highlight of her birthday God decides to send some rain to the desert. Mind you we haven't gotten much/any rain of late so we aren't really complaining too loudly. The one inch of rain we did get was greatly appreciated, but did worry us as we were hoping to get out to our activity.



Between the meanest Mommy in the whole world and the meanest Daddy in the whole world we made the birthday girl wait till after breakfast.



And to top it off we made her wait till everyone was dressed, including socks and shoes! Oh the horror!

She was finally able to start the festivities, as you can see she did pretty well. Her little brother and sister even came out ok on the presents courtesy of their Aunt Beth and big sister Emelie.











Doesn't every little girl need a Dewalt drill?



Of course the Dewalt box contained this....



Olivia was very happy with her "Peng" as he has now been named.



And even more fun presents for everyone!





And a sign of things to come...



Of course there was the obligatory birthday cake, in Emelie's case it ends up being 1/2 a cake as Vicky's birthday is in two days.



Then it was onto the special birthday present. This was something that would have been more than a little hard to wrap, even if we could have fit it in the house. Of course it would have also violated Daddy's "net three pet" rule, (no more than three pets at any one time). In fact in order to have one of these as a pet I think we would have had to give up all three existing pets and a small child or two.

Our local nature museum, the Heard Natural Science Museum was doing a Dinosaurs Alive exhibit. They had seven life size animatronic dinosaurs on display. As Monkey #1 is a dinosaur junkie we figured this would be a great birthday treat for her!

Gee, if I didn't know better I'd say someone's first encounter with a life size dinosaur was more than a little scary! I was beginning to wonder if we might have been wise to bring a change of clothes for her as I thought she was about ready to pee herself!



Of course it was more than interesting seeing the monkey's reactions to these dinosaurs. For the most part they immediately realized that these were large meat eating predators. I guess somewhere down in the deep primitive part of the brain there is an instinctual response programmed in. The exception to the rule though was little Miss Olivia, she lived up to her nickname of Dora the explorer and charged right in.

Once the monkeys realized they weren't in imminent danger of being eaten, and conquered their fear by roaring back at the dinosaurs, everything was fine. The monkeys were actually louder than the dinosaurs!



Of course coming nose to nose with this does make you pause...











And the star of the exhibit I think finally convinced Emelie that one would actually not fit in our backyard. Of course trying to get small children to line up and behave for a picture is about as easy as herding cats. I was wondering if shock collars might have been useful.



I really like the size perspective on this one...



And should you wonder if those dinosaurs were just standing there I have a .avi clip of the T-Rex, unfortunately I can't get it to tag onto this...