Dino-Mania!

We have been invaded by dinosaurs. Big ones, little ones, herbivores and carnivores. Some with simple names and some with ridiculously long names. It all started with this book I checked out from the library. Ethan had expressed a small interest in dinosaurs around Christmas, so I thought this would be a good book for him because it's geared to preschoolers and has the most amazing pictures of dinosaurs. I had no idea what I was unleashing!

Kaitlyn and Ethan both quickly became obsessed with dinosaurs, spending countless hours pouring over the pages of this book. We read this book before every nap and every bedtime for quite a while. They learned how to pronounce (correctly, I might add!) all the names of the dinosaurs. Ever heard of a Micropachycephalosaurus? Yep, me neither. But it sounds pretty cool when it's coming out of the mouth of a 2 year old and a 4 year old. Seriously, their knowledge about dinosaurs continually astounds me. They can identify every single dinosaur in this book (and there are lots of them!) by sight. They can reliably tell me what they ate, how they defended themselves and distinctive features of each dino. So when they devoured all the information in this book, I decided to bump it up a notch and check out the National Geographic Dino book for elementary school kids.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that there were a whole lot of dinosaurs that the first book left out! So we learned a new round of dinosaur names and facts. Ethan loves learning about all the meat-eaters. Pretend play centers pretty exclusively around our prehistoric friends these days. Today, I took the kids to a park with walking trails. They wanted to "look" for dinosaurs, so we pretended to see all sorts of reptiles. We occasionally ran away from an imaginary hungry Carnotaurus or looked up in the sky to see a Pteranadon flying overhead. Kaitlyn later decided that we were in the Triassic period today and she stated, "I'm glad we're in the Triassic period so that we don't have to see a Yangchuanosaurus or a T Rex. They lived in different time periods." You know, just normal conversations with a 4-year-old.

I'm not sure how long this obsession will last, but it's pretty cool to see them become mini "experts" in something. I'm going to keep feeding the beast as long as they're interested and excited about learning more. Our zoo has an exhibit opening soon with full-sized animatronic dinosaurs. Kaitlyn asks almost daily if the exhibit is open yet, so I'm looking forward to seeing their faces when they see some "real" dinosaurs. And I think we're going to take a day trip up to Dinosaur World in Kentucky this spring. It's cheesy, but the kids will love it. And I hear that Fernbank in Atlanta has fossils of an Argentinosaurus and a Giganotosaurus, two of their favorites. Roadtrip? Maybe they'll be paleontologists when they grow up :)

Ethan is having a dinosaur birthday party on Saturday. The theme is a shocker, I know. I'm in complete denial about my baby turning 3 next week. Stay tuned for pictures, not only from the party but from the last two months as well.