Another anniversary of sorts

Last week we received a notice informing us that it is time to renew our annual membership to the Museum of Nature. That means it's been about a year since Henry fell head-over-heels in love with dinosaurs. I think it was a visit to the remodeled Dino exhibit at the museum that triggered this obsession, but honestly, I can't remember. All I know is that it's now impossible to overstate just how completely his imagination has been captivated by the prehistoric beasts. Around our house, it's all dinos, all the time. Henry reads dino books, plays with dino toys, wears dino clothes, sleeps between dino sheets, watches dino shows, plays dino video games on dino websites, and visits the dino museum at least twice a month. He also spends a lot of time pretending he's a dinosaur (usually a T-Rex), especially when he's feeling insecure in a social situation (he turns his hands into claws and roars at people). In the summer he collects rocks and sticks in the yard, claims they are fossilized bones, and assembles them into dinosaur skeletons. In the winter he does the same thing with chunks of ice and snow. It can take us a long time to walk home from school, as Henry is constantly discovering prehistoric fossils along the sidewalk. Basically, not an hour of the day goes by in our household without some talk of dinosaurs.

I admit that it can get a little tedious talking about and playing dinosaurs all the time, but the positive aspects of this obsession far outweigh any irritations. Henry is a sponge when it comes to learning about dinosaurs, and it's been very easy to harness this interest to teach him about letters (which dino names start with C, etc.) and numbers (how many claws does an allosaurus have, etc.). He's also mastered a huge list of dino-related vocabulary. I have my pronunciation of some dinosaur or other corrected by my 3-year-old at least once a day (does the name "dolichorhynchops" roll off your tongue? I didn't think so). Despite my best efforts to promote Hedge Fund Manager as an ideal career choice for a young man who would surely like to help his Mommy to retire in style, Henry keeps insisting that he wants to be a paleontologist when he grows up. We'll see about that, but I will say that we've read a lot of profiles of actual paleontologist over the last year, and it's striking how many of them say that they first fell in love with dinosaurs in childhood and never lost interest. So, never say never. Twenty years from now, if he's off digging for bones with a wire brush in the middle of some godforsaken dune, happy as a clam, I won't be a bit surprised.