Meetings are interesting in my business. Nevertheless, we got our work done. But when a meeting participant said that he used to be a tour guide in a dinosaur park, my ears perked up. I know where that is! You were in high school? Sigh. I was a young moom with my first baby! And she was fussy the day we were driving back from St. Louie past that old dinosaur park. The one with the big brontosaurus in the front. And maybe an elephant a mastodon and I dunno what else. I also dunno why we were on the back road that day. It was a long drive and the cute little urchin was just about at the absolute end and it prob’ly wouldda been better to just take the blasted freeway and get it over with. God knows, our kids spent a lot of their lives in automotive vee-hickles. Sometimes it was better for everyone if we just got it over with. Anyway, she was fussing and crying on and off and the GG was holding her. No, she wasn’t in her car seat. I know. When I was a kid we didn’t even have those. And then. The dinosaur park came along. I said, “look at those big aminals!” The GG held the little lizard up to the window to look and, magically, she stopped fussing! She *looked*! Unfortunately, that ploy lasted maybe about 10 seconds and we were past the place. It was December. The dinosaur place was a seasonal business and it was definitely not open. I doubt if we’d’ve stopped if it had been open. It was getting toward the end of our trip home and we just wanted to get there.

I don’t know if that little encounter was what started it or not but the Beach Urchins’ childhood was filled with dinosaurs. We listened to the Wee Sing Dinosaurs cassette tape every time we drove to nursery school or anywhere. Mouse would say, “Dinosaurs On!” whenever we got in the Jetta. And so we would listen about the brachiosaurus playground slide (and I think he was a schoolbus too) and I forget what else. We had the dinosaur tape and all kinds of dinosaur books and plastic dinosaurs and the whole works and Lizard Breath, for many of her early years, would say she wanted to be a paleontologist. When she got to first grade and they studied dinosaurs, her teacher was amazed when she asked the class who knew what you called people who studied dinosaurs and the normally quiet little Lizard was the first to answer.

Both of my urchins went on to other interests and maybe are still discovering their interests. I know I still am. I guess, in the long run, listening to the Wee Sing Dinosaur tape over and over and over again prepared me for Weezer CDs, which was really just a few years later.

Secret: I actually *liked* Weezer. I never got tired of listening to it in the POC’s crappy CD player when we were driving north on the I75 SUV Speedway. Especially that sweater song. 😉

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 at 7:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.