Our Summer Obsessions - Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs have long been of minor interest around our house. Sam has long loved going to the T-Rex restaurant and had a favorite book when he was two called Dinosaur Train (the name alone shows why the book was beloved). But dinosaurs were a distant third in favorite things to trains and cars.

Early this spring both Sam and Noah became simultaneously infatuated with dinosaurs. Perhaps it was from a book, perhaps from a show they watched, but my best guess for their new found love was a box of dinosaurs our next-door neighbor dropped off one dreary February day. The box was full of small dinosaurs and large ones, multi-hued ones and several monochromatic, and watching the boys with those dinosaurs was like reading Sammy and the Dinosaurs. They ate breakfast with dinosaurs, they slept with dinosaurs, they took baths with dinosaurs, and they took dinosaurs to church. Soon, both boys wanted to wear dinosaur shirts everywhere we went and they stomped up and down "roaring" at everyone we met. We were dinosaur central.

Dinomania escalated when grandparents started visiting this summer. First, Nana and Granddad came to visit and took the boys to T-Rex and got them a few more dinosaur figures to love and adore. Then May and Pop came and we all went to Union Station's "Dinosaurs Unearthed" exhibit which featured dinosaur bones and moving recreations of dinosaurs. The boys were in heaven (as you can see with Sam here holding a Stegosaurus's tail spike):To top the visit off, May and Pop got the boys dinosaurs at Build-A-Dinosaur, Sam getting a pterodactyl and Noah getting an orange, fuzzy velociraptor. Now with our plastic and stuffed dinosaurs, we are never far from a dino explosion at our house.