Good Parenting or Enabling

I may have mentioned, once or twice, that my daughter is obsessed with dinosaurs. She has, at last count, 1,000,000 dinos or something like that. She knows their names and she knows whether they are plant or meat eaters. Its kind of scary.

So I decided to take a look at all of the dino paraphernalia that she has. At our house she has 5 unidentified bath/pool toy dinos, a dino puzzle with seven pieces and 8 plastic dinos (I could give you a who's who but you really don't want to know). Not too bad. She also has 3 dino books. A recording of the movie Dinosaur, which is watched in some part at least once a day. And at least two dinos are carried in her little red purse everytime we leave the house.



At my mom's house she has the same bath/pool dinos, a one armed T-Rex (according to her his arm will grow back), several other unidentified dinos, 5 finger puppet dinos and 5 wind-up dinos. She also has (on loan from my mom's library at school) 10 books on various dinos, including Megalodon, Apatosaurus and Velociraptors. She practically has the books memorized and always wants to see the skeleton pictures at the end.



And now its gotten to the point that if I see a dinosaur, I'll buy it for her. Whenever I'm at Target, I rummage through the bins to see if I can find a new one she doesn't already have (last time I scored a Gigantosaurus). They have a mini-dino set with 15 dinos and fake palm trees that I totally want to buy but I am afraid it will contain repeats of what we already have. And yesterday when I was buying a new shredder at an office supply store, I seriously considered buying a Stegosaurus calculator. But then I realized she can't do math yet so I skipped it. This time.

Maybe we've got a budding palentologist on our hands. Or maybe not. But for right now Bunny's dinos are like dolls to her. Yesterday we put on some tunes and had a good old fashion dino bash. Bunny served refreshments of chocolate cookies and vanilla juice. (Which if you didn't know is made by sticking a cardboard tube into a teapot. Its very tasty)




Parasaurolophus and Spinosaurus where having a dance party. They tried to start a dino mosh pit but Gigantosaurus was having none of that. So then they started pogo bouncing on their tails. Well that got the crowd going and soon Stegasaurus, Brachiosaurus and Triceratops joined in. And T-Rex accompanied us on the trumpet. It was a kick ass party and a good time was has by most. Except for Euoplocephalus (or as Bunny calls him Minmi, which is a similar looking but different dino) who decided to take a nap.

So I may chill out on buying new dinos for the time being. But I'm going to revel in the dino mania for as long as it lasts