Brachiostegoeuploapataceratops Rex

My son bought a large box of dinosaurs with some of his Christmas money. He wandered around the toy store for a couple of hours, unsure of what he wanted to buy with his newfound wealth. He is only two years old after all, and most grown ups would have difficulty choosing what to buy if they were let loose in a toy store with shiny plastic gift cards.

Really it was my husband who ultimately selected the big yellow/orange bucket of prehistoric lizards. Not that my son needed much convincing: he seems to think they’re pretty cool. According to my big boy all small boys need to have at least one or two (or twelve) hefty dinos. At first I thought that maybe BoBeans would be better with animals whose names he could articulate, but my husband assured me that little boys have an uncanny ability to pronounce dinosaur names. He was right.

Now, the trouble with plastic dinosaurs is that they have pointy tails. Pointy, pointy. My sweet little angel of a daughter is becoming extremely mobile. She rolls all over the place; I’ll put her down on the floor, turn around to eat a sandwich and, viola!, she’s four yards away and facing in the opposite direction. She is not an aimless roller: usually she’s aiming for something. If there is a choice between rolling two feet to the right to get her hands on a nice soft teething ring or rolling ten feet to the left to grapple with a pointy lizard, she’ll go left. So while I’m trying to enjoy a ham on wheat my daughter will be flinging a Brachiosaurus around by its neck while its tail dangerously darts about her eyeballs.

My son likes to play day-at-the-jungle: it’s like day-at-the-beach except instead of being buried in sand I get buried up to my neck in dinosaurs. They have a peculiar smell, all those plastic dinos. It makes me feel kind of woozy when they are all piled up on top of me. Therefore, it concerned me a little bit when my husband lifted an unsuspecting Stegosaurus to his nose, inhaled deeply and said, “They smell just like I remember them.” Aaahhhhhhhhh.