Dinosaurs Have to Go Too

This summer started the visits to the library with Daddy. I love the library. I love books. I love to read. I was just a little afraid to take our destructive children to a place filled with wonderful books that don’t belong to us and can be destroyed so easily.

Now every time I hear the sound of paper tearing I fly through the house in a panic to stop the crime and hope in the small section of my brain that is still functional through the terror that it is not a library book, but rather some innocuous shred of paper like a sales receipt or the grocery list or a book that already belongs to us that is old and has been through three or four children previously.

It wouldn’t be so bad if the children were content to sit apart from each other and read. The baby, however, likes to look at the same book as her brother and when two children are paging through the same book in opposite directions disaster is bound to ensue. And of course there are the small tears already in the book from someone else’s child that are exceedingly tempting to tug at.

One of the first books borrowed from the library was a lovely book about dinosaurs. On one of the pages amidst pictures of bones was a picture of fossilized dinosaur droppings. It would seem that the technical name for dino poop is rather cumbersome to the mouth of a two-year-old; so in my husband’s all-surpassing wisdom and foresight he decided to refer to it as “fossil poop.”

This a toddler can say. And Daddy thought it was funny. Everything sounds cute and adorable when spoken with the voice of the sweetest boy in the whole world, even “fossil poop.” So the words were spoken, and Daddy laughed; every time the phrase was uttered, Daddy chortled.

The little boy noticed that Daddy was amused. He’s quick that way. When he gets reprimanded for turning summersaults on the couch or squeezing his sister’s cheeks too hard he will look into Daddy’s eyes very gravely and say, “fossil poop,” like it is some sort of Get Out Of Jail Free card. It is the period at the end of nearly every sentence. All of his bowel movements are now big fossil poops. It’s beginning to get tiresome, like a bad joke. Try explaining that to a toddler who has gotten so much use out of it.

At least he can also identify almost every type of dinosaur, whale and shark. There has definitely been some real learning to punctuate the bad education. I’m really hoping that the fossil poop education stops here and that my sweet little boy doesn’t decide to hold a class in the church nursery one of these weeks.