Mason and Laura: Mason's Birthday

Mason had a wonderful birthday this year. Mason wanted to go to the new Utah Museum of Natural History and luckily it opened the weekend before his birthday. The new museum is really cool and I highly recommend it to everyone. Since it was opening weekend, we got an added bonus because they opened up "the behind the scenes" so we got to see labs and storage rooms. Mason even got to hold a real dinosaur fossil.

I'm sure you can guess what this is. It is a plate on the back of a stegosaurus.

Whenever I asked Mason what he wanted for his birthday, he kept saying that he wanted a fossil. Well, we both knew that a really good fossil would cost a lot of money that we didn't have. So I think that holding a fossil like this is a pretty good compromise. Plus, I bought Mason a little fake plastic T-Rex head at the store.

Also we found out that 2 new dinosaurs were discovered about 4 years ago in Utah and that they were named last year on 10/10/10. They were both Ceratops: Cosmos and Diablo.

This is Cosmos. It took two helicopters to carry his head.

Cosmos is really cool because of all of his horns. Mason and I thought that it kind of looks like hair. They told us that his horns were particularly thick and heavy, so he must have had some neck to carry the weight.

They gave us this picture of what they image Cosmos looked like.
The lady that had been working on it also signed it for us.

This is Diablo. How freaking cool does he look? He is my new favorite dinosaur.
When the lady told me his name, I just got a huge grin on my face.

Well here are the other pictures of the museum. It may seem like a lot but I really didn't take that many pictures there. There is so much more, so I highly recommend going to it.

Really cool display case at the beginning.

Wall of heads, loved it!

This alligator was found in Utah! 13 feet long! It was huge!

A lot of things I couldn't even take pictures of because they were so huge that I couldn't get it all into frame.

Again we got to go behing the scenes. This part we were in a storage room.
Don't worry Mason didn't really take anything out, but it sounded like some little kids were trying to open the boxes, so I'm sure that the museum is happy that these areas are now closed off to the public.

That night we went out to eat. We were going to go to the Cheesecake Factory, but when we got there we found out it would be about a two hour wait. So we went to Macaroni Grill instead. Mason got free cake!

The next day we had Mason's family over for cake and ice cream. They gave Mason lots of presents that were toys. He was thrilled.

Mason loves Reese's peanut butter cups. So I decided to make homemade ones. Well sort of. I wasn't going to bother with making them as "cups" so it was just bars instead. I kind of burnt the top layer of chocolate, but it still tasted pretty good. You can check out the recipe here.