This is an Argentinosaurus, the biggest dinosaur ever to live. Cars are now so last year... Sam's big obsession now is dinosaurs. Even though he's only just starting to read, he's memorising an encyclopaedia of dinosaur facts. The tallest. The smallest. The strongest. The fastest. He knows which era they all lived in, which ones were carnivores / herbivores / omnivores, which ones preyed on other ones. We took him took the Manchester Museum last weekend to see the T-Rex skeleton there. He loved it.
You forget the wonder of discovery when you're old and jaded like I am, but if you're a parent you get to rediscover it through your children. The questions he's starting to ask - about the world, about how long we've all been here and where we all came from... all the things we knew once but have forgotten or just stopped caring about in and amongst the day-to-day mundanities. Children remind us to be amazed. One of Sam's books tells us that if the life-span of the earth was compressed into one year, human beings would just have arrived on the last day of December. Long term readers of this blog may recall that the song that was playing on the radio in the delivery room as Sam was born was Show Me The Wonder by the Manic Street Preachers. This song becomes more apt with every passing day.
The word Sam uses the most at the moment is "gigantic", so I thought I'd add this Pixies classic to one of our in-car CDs. It's a while since I've listened to it and I was quite surprised to hear Kim Deal on vocals... in fact, for a while I thought I'd put the wrong version on the CD. In my head, I was certain I could hear Frank Black singing it. Memory plays tricks on me, but then I am fast becoming a dinosaur...
Sam no doubt loves the Giganotosaurus then...
ReplyDeleteGreat song. Kim is much missed from the current line-up, I'd say.
The wonder of discovery, it's just the best thing. I envy you being able to experience it through Sam, never knowing what might come next, but I'm glad to still be able to feel it myself from time to time, even at 55, so there's hope! Yeah, there are fewer and fewer 'firsts'and so much to be cynical about but I still get excited about little things of wonder, little discoveries and learning new stuff (usually weird stuff about beetles, or birds, or worms etc. or how the octopus is as intelligent as a dog - wow! - thanks to Brian Cox's recent documentary!) I reckon the minute I lose that feeling completely will be the minute I may as well give up.
ReplyDeleteI love dinosaurs too! Was incredibly fortunate to be able to spend a few days coming up with ideas/sketches for dinosaur toys for Jellycat a little while back and a few of them made it to the production line! You can't beat a fluffy Pterodactyl...