A couple weeks ago I had a little Amazon shopping spree. There were a few books I’d been pining for, plus I had my eye on a set of fancy colored pencils (which haven’t yet made me a better artist, but I’m willing to give it time). I also bought some vitamins because I’m supposedly an adult. I had an Amazon gift card to pay for it all, which made the whole process even more exciting, because free stuff is best stuff! I got home that night and told Mark about it.

Me: Hey, I got a gift card from work so I bought some books and colored pencils, and also vitamins.

Mark: Sweet. I bought something today too, but it’s a surprise.

Me: What is it?

Mark: It won’t be here until Monday. You’re just going to have to wait.

Me: What IS IT?

Mark: It’s a surprise.

Me: How much did it cost?

Mark: Fifty bucks.

Me: Ok, but what is it?

Mark: Sur. Prise.

Me: Come onnnnn.

Mark: You’ll like it. It’s something for US.

Me: US? You mean like, a sex thing?

Mark: Not a sex thing, no. Welllll…I mean, I guess it COULD be a sex thing if you really wanted, but it wouldn’t be very comfortable.

I could see that I wasn’t going to be wheedling any useful hints out of him, so I flounced off to make dinner and basically forgot about the surprise for a few days.

Fast forward to Saturday afternoon. Junie and I were chillin’ out, maxin’, relaxin’ all cool when the mail guy pulled up outside our door and left a package on the stoop. I went out to retrieve it and, seeing that it had Mark’s name on it, realized it must be The Surprise arriving early. Mark was actually in the bath when it showed up, and I demand further adultiness credit for not instantly yelling up the stairs to him that he had to come down right that second and open the package. Instead, I placed it on his chair so that he’d see it as soon as he came back.

I was in the kitchen futzing with bread dough, struggling to maintain my hard-fought veneer of nonchalance when Mark finally reappeared. He opened the package up and brought it over for me to look at as he chortled with glee. I looked down at the contents.

“Jurassic World Inflatable T-Rex Costume”, it said.

What it SHOULD have said was, “All Rhubarb’s Dreams Are Coming True”, because HOLY SHIT, YOU GUYS. I love dinosaurs way more than any normal 37 year old non-paleontologist woman probably should. And those videos of people dressed up in inflatable T-Rex costumes doing stuff like pole dancing and ice skating? ENDLESSLY amusing to me. They’re my favorite.

Mark opened the costume up and started reading the directions while I cleaned the bread dough off my hands. The whole thing smelled exactly like a new shower curtain. After what likely would have proven to be a rather embarrassing amount of time had we been keeping track, we finally figured out how to install the fan into the costume, and how the battery pack attached to it. It was a muggy day (Vermont is GROSS in July. Don’t let the travel brochures (do they even make those anymore?) tell you any different), and he was still kind of damp from the bath, but Mark insisted on getting into the costume right then and there.

The whole thing is basically constructed like a big dinosaur-shaped bag with elastic cuffs at wrists and ankles. You get in via a long zipper up the front, and a little fan blows inside the costume to inflate the fabric around you. The head of the costume isn’t detachable – it’s fused to the rest of the fabric at the neckline, and there’s a panel of clear plastic in the dinosaur’s neck approximately where the average height adult’s face would be. Which is good I guess, because being trapped inside a dinosaur suit with no ability to see one’s surroundings is dangerous. I mean, how are you going to defend your turf if another dinosaur steps to you, you know? Safety first.

We unzipped the thing, got his legs through the leg-holes, he got one shoulder in…and then the plastic-y, nylon-y fabric suctioned to his sweaty back. There were several seconds of hilarious albeit futile flailing, wherein my terribleness as a person was reaffirmed several times over by the fact that all I could do was stand there giggling helplessly while my poor sweet husband was trapped in a vaguely dinosaur shaped straitjacket made of shower curtain material. Finally, we figured out that he’d have to put his head into the deflated, and therefore very floppy and claustrophobic, head of the costume before he could get his other shoulder in. The clear plastic panel in the dinosaur’s neck area fogged up with Mark’s breath almost immediately, adding yet another layer of awful hilarity.

Once we got the arms sorted out and the fan turned on, we zipped him up. During the frenzied flailing we had managed to create a little tear along one of the costume’s seams. There were several tense moments where it seemed like as a result the fan might not actually inflate the costume, but the T-Rex did eventually roar to life, and the posing commenced:

I especially like the fact that the progression of the four small pictures on the bottom there make it seem like he’s coming to eat the viewer. Well done snapping pics there, me!

After about five minutes of picture-taking, Mark mentioned that it was getting hard to breathe in there and that he’d like to come out. We got him out of the suit, laid it out to dry (it got really sweaty, really quickly), and set about posting the pictures on Facebook and enjoying the heady dopamine rush of validating like-clicks.

No one has gotten back into the costume yet, but I’ve been thinking up all sorts of applications for it once the weather gets less jungle-y. At some point I’d like to wear it to the grocery store, for instance. I’d also like to sneak up on family members with it, like peeking in their windows. It’s obviously going to have to be worn to work for Halloween (I’m the only one in the office who ever dresses up for Halloween anyway, so might as well go all-out). And, thanks to Haddaway’s “What Is Love” popping up on my Spotify station yesterday, I’ve realized that my true calling in life is to bring into this world the masterpiece that I will call…

…A Night At The Rex-bury.

And no, it won’t be a sex thing.