I don’t know how Hollie finds these things, but it’s like every weekend (unless we’re booked up with birthday parties) she will uncover some sort of fun event happening in the region that we just have to get ourselves down to. The most recent example is our trip to Dino Kingdom. Found down at Thoresby Park, it’s an interactive attraction made to give little ones a taste of prehistoric life.
Unlike a similar thing we went to earlier in the year, this place was filled with 3D dinosaur creations that actually moved around and made sounds. While last time we saw the illusion of them meeting real life dinosaurs shattered within moments, it was a lot easier to convince the boys (plus their friends who joined us) that we were among actual dinosaurs that had been trained to stay in their individual sections.
As well as all the lifelike figures, the place was filled with all kinds of interesting sections for the kids to get a deeper understanding of the creatures we had come to see. In particular, they loved being able to colour in their own dinosaurs and then get them to appear on a big screen in front of them in a dimly lit tent.
I can tell that it’s only going to be a couple of years before the boys’ dinosaur knowledge completely eclipses mine, so I should really be using my advantage of being actually able to read the signs next to the figures to learn to distinguish between all of these species and take an interest in them. Honestly – dinosaurs didn’t interest me when I was younger, but it’s taken until I’ve had little ones of my own (that love a bit of Andy’s Dinosaur Adventures) to discover how amazing it was that these things used to roam Earth.
We’ve come to learn that our boys can’t fathom how anyone can walk past a fairground ride without having a go (no matter how scary it may look to us adults) so made sure to sample every ride they were tall enough to have a go on.
We were at Dino Kingdom in its final week, but I would imagine that it’s not going to be a one-off.
