Feeding the fixation

I began this post a few days ago, and was pleasantly surprised by the serendipitous interview with Temple Grandin I came across this morning in the Schafer Autism Report. When asked about a statement in her book regarding fixations, Grandin replied,

Let's say that a child loves trains -- that's a very common fixation. Well, read a book about trains, do math problems with trains, read about the history of the railroad. In other words, if a kid loves trains, you can somehow drag a train into just about every subject in school to get him motivated to study it. Fixations are tremendous motivators."

Jonah love trains. Or, I should say, he loves train tracks. He builds extremely complex, often raised, rail systems out of his Brio tracks and a variety of supports, including cans, toys and lumber scraps.

Sam's interests, however, are zoological rather than mechanical. Well, paleozoological. He loves dinosaurs. A child who seldoms speaks more than a few words at a time, he can name over a hundreds different species of dinosaurs and terasaurs.

So we plan on taking Dr. Grandin's advice and feeding Sam's fixation with creatures which have not roamed the earth for hundreds of millions of years. Fortunately, a few hours searching turned up quite a smorgasborg of dino-offerings. We could plan our entire trip just paleo-hopping.

Dinosaur State Park (Connecticut)

Museum of Natural History (New York)

Dinosaur Beach Adventure Theme Park (website coming soon) (New Jersey)

Carnegie Museum of Natural History (Pennsylvania)

Old Pro Golf Dinosaurs! (Maryland)

National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian) (District of Columbia)

Dinosaur Land (Virginia)

Fernbank Museum of Natural History (Georgia)

Dinosaur Adventure Land (Florida)

Disney's Animal Kingdom (Florida)

Dinosaur Valley State Park (Texas)

Dinosphere @ Children's Museum of Indianapolis (Indiana)

The Field Museum (Illinois)

Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry (Utah)

The Wyoming Dinosaur Center & Dig Site (Wyoming)

Dinosaur Ridge (Colorado)

Dinosaur National Monument (Colorado)

Denver Museum of Nature and Science (Colorado)

The Dinosaur Museum (Utah)

Dinosaur Discovery Center @ Knott's Berry Farm (California)

UC Museum of Paleontology (California)

Prehistoric World (Ontario)


Of course, sometimes you have to truly feed the boy, not just the fixation:

Dinosaur Bar-B-Que (New York)

If you have information regarding these dino-features, please share in comments below. Also, let us know about other entrees which feed the dino-fixation diet.