Meet the Meat

When you have a child, there are certain things that you know will challange you: topics, concepts, and situations that make you cringe to think about even when your child is unborn. A list of the big ones could include: sex, death, God, and Santa Claus (not necessarily in that order). In our house there is another one that, while it doesn't exactly make us cringe, we didn't know how we were going to deal with it.

Meat.

Heather and I are vegetarians. Up to this point, Cailan has also been a vegetarian. As written in the comic Get Fuzzy: "Anyone is a vegetarian if you don't give them meat." So far this hasn't been an issue to anyone in the house except Utah. We haven't really known how we would introduce the concept of meat, but knew it was coming when one day after school Cailan said, "what was that pink stuff those kids were eating?" We told him it was meat, but we knew he didn't really understand what that meant, and we didn't really go any farther. Most Americans aren't really comfortable dealing openly with the reality of where their food comes from, and I think it's safe to say that a three year old could possibly be bothered by it.

Day of the Dinosaurs

Cailan has kind of solved this situation for us. Since he is dino-crazy, and now quite capable of reading his books on his own, his dino-talk is no longer just the names of dinosaurs. His discourses include information he has gleaned from his readings and our household discussions. Not just "Dinosaur", Not even just "Siamotyrannus" , but now "Siamotyrannus is a theropod. He was found in Thailand. He is a carnivore. He is looking for meat. Is he a predator or a scavanger?" (he has now come up with a distinction between predator and scavanger - predators find their meat walking or running around and scavangers find their meat laying on the ground). Due to the section of his Dinosaurs of the World books that lists the food of each dino, Cailan has become somewhat obsessed with the idea of "meat". His toy dinos often are going around the house looking for meat (only the carnivores, of course), and he gets quite excited when I ask him what a carnivore eats. He is even comfortable with the idea that dinosaurs eat other dinosaurs.

Example 1


Here is a juxtaposition of two of Cailan's famous Lego dinosaurs. The one on the Left is an earlier "pre-meat" dilophosaurus, the one one the right now features a red lego hanging out of his "mouth". Yes, this is in fact the lego version of meat.
So far Cailan has not asked to try meat, but it will certainly come up. And now I know what to say: "Cailan, what kind of dinosaur would you like to eat?"

Bones, bikes, blood

Don't panic! Although the title of this post sounds like we experienced some kind of gory bicycle wreck, the three items are unrelated, except that they all happened this weekend. On Saturday morning we decided to take a day trip to Moab so we could hike the Mill Canyon Dinosaur Trail and look for dinosaur footprints. The drive there was strangely beautiful: it was kind of foggy and the desert we drove through, normally brown and scrubby, was smooth and sparkly, huge stretches of unmarked snow. The sage brush and bitterbrush plants were frosted; bigger trees had mounds of snow on their branches. Sections of the Colorado river were frozen and covered in snow.

As we got close to Moab, we emerged from the fog to find a sunny blue sky, though there were still a few inches of snow on the ground. First we went to a couple bike stores; it's always fun to see what's new and different in the shops. It's still too early in the season, and the shops that were open were neither fully stocked nor fully staffed, so we didn't really get to see any bikes. Then we had lunch at Eddie McStiff's and rummaged around at a used clothing store where I found a fabulous knobbly sweater for me and a couple of pairs of jeans for Cailan. Finally it had warmed up enough for a pleasant hike, so we headed north of town for a few miles.


We pulled off the highway to a dirt road that was covered with hard-packed snow and bumped along it to the trailhead. The hike is very short, but most of the trail runs along the base of a short cliff where there are lots and lots of exposed dinosaur bones embedded in the rock. The first picture is vertebrae from a sauropod, probably camarasaurus, and the second is ribs, again from a sauropod. There were also bones from allosaurus, camptosaurus and stegosaurus.




We never found the dinosaur footprints that are supposed to be at this site. I assume they were covered in snow. The snow at Mill Canyon was really wild; the top surface was a jumble of inch to inch-and-a-half long ice crystals.



Sunday was another nice day, a great day for a bike ride. Mom and Dad gave us a gift certificate to REI for our anniversary, and we used that to by a child bike seat. So far we've always pulled Cailan in a trailer, but we learned that he has more fun when he's up on the bike seat. Our new seat got here last week, but we had to order an extra rack to attach the bike seat to our road tandem. Chris got that installed Sunday morning, so in the afternoon we were able to take our first family ride on our 'triple'. The child seat sits up pretty high and is close to the stoker seat, so that Cailan's knees were almost touching my rear but my feet had lots of clearance from his foot rest. It was nice to be able to reach back and give him a pat and to hear him during the ride.

We bundled him up with tights, fleece-lined wind pants, snowboots, a long-sleeved shirt, wool sweater, coat, gloves, and a Smartwool hat under his helmet. He stayed warm throughout most of the ride, though he did say a few times that he was cold - his cheeks were very red! We rode north from town past some farms and giant houses; we saw horses, cows, alpaca (Cailan's favorite part of the ride by far), a llama, a burro, and three goats. We put in about 20 miles, which isn't really a very long ride, but it's as much as we can do with a 3-year-old and temperatures in the 40s. We'll have to find someone to take a picture of our bike with all of us on it.

The blood part of the weekend came at home, after the bike ride. I was fixing some post-ride hot chocolate for Cailan and me, which we planned to enjoy with some freshly baked peanut butter cookies. Cailan was twirling in sock feet on the hardwood floors of the kitchen, wiped out, and did a face plant. He cut his upper lip pretty bad, but he was ready for his hot chocolate before I even got all the blood wiped away.

Desperately seeking...

...more of this fabric. It's a "Snuggle Flannel" from Joann's, and we need a little more for Cailan's bed.

Forgotten

Cailan likes to use the word ‘forgot’.

Sometimes he uses it to talk about inanimate objects, especially when they’re not where he thinks they should be. When we were visiting my family at Christmas, Cailan and Debbie were playing with some magnetic letters one evening, and when they were done we put the letters back in their metal box. The next day, Cailan found a W on the floor and said “The W forgot to be in the box.” Another time he found one Automoblox in the dining room while all the others were put away in the living room and said “This car forgot to be on the shelf.”

Of course, he seems to really like to use the word when Mommy or Daddy forget something. If I’m singing to him while I’m putting him to bed, and I don’t sing his favorite songs in the right order, he’ll tell me “Mommy forgot to sing the song about going for a bike ride.” If Chris fixes him a snack but doesn’t get him something to drink, Cailan will let him know: “Daddy forgot the milk.”

The other evening, we were all on the couch in our before bedtime ritual, reading volume of Dinosaurs of the World. Each page of the book is about a different dinosaur, with the dinosaur’s name in big letters on the upper left, a short, bold-faced introductory paragraph right below the name, and then more text and a few pictures. We usually read the dinosaur’s name and the introductory paragraph, then talk about the pictures.

So we got to the page about Stegoceras, where the introductory paragraph goes:

Stegoceras was a pachycephalosaur (thick-headed dinosaur) that lived in Western North America in the Cretaceous period. No complete skeletons have
been found, but scientists can tell a lot from its skull.

Chris read the paragraph but omitted the little parenthetical phrase:

Stegoceras was a pachycephalosaur that lived in Western
North America in the Cretaceous period. No complete skeletons have been
found, but scientists can tell a lot from its skull.

Cailan was apparently reading along quite attentively. He said “Daddy forgot to read about thick-headed dinosaur!”

Music together

Chris and Cailan went to a music class today. It went much better than the last music class they tried, the one with the evil elephant. Cailan was a little hesitant at first and hung back at the edge of the room instead of jumping into the fray with the other kids, but he had a good time. Here is his report:

I played with scarfs. The scarf was kind of red. The scarfs were flying. They were ramphorhynchuses and pteranodons. I played with instruments. They were shakers and bells. I played with balls. I danced.

Christmas vacation

We had an 11-day, 3-state Christmas vacation. Crazy! Some highlights of the trip:

• On the first day, driving from GJ to Raton, we lucked out and had clear conditions, even going over Monarch Pass. But, on the 2-lane cutoff from Cotopaxi to Walsenberg, we missed the right turn at Westcliffe and didn’t even realize it until 17 miles later, when I saw some road signs that didn’t make any sense at all. Happily, our mistake sent us on a very pretty, though somewhat snowy, route through the Sangre de Cristo mountains. Maybe we’ll go back there sometime on purpose.

• The second day, on the seemingly endless drive from Raton to Oklahoma City, we battled fierce winds and an onslaught of tumbleweeds. It was like being in a video game, only was I supposed to be dodging the tumbleweeds or crashing into them? I couldn’t help flinching every time one would roll up over the hood of the Subaru and bounce off the windshield. Chris and his mom, in front of me in her minivan, saw tumbleweeds getting blown up an embankment at the side of the road and soar through the air clear across the road.

• That night, we slept in an RV in Aunt Bev’s backyard, but it was more like a houseboat, the way it was continually rocking and swaying in the wind. I felt a tiny bit seasick and had a bit of trouble in the morning with the first few steps I took on solid ground.

• The third day we arrived in Kansas. This was the first time I’d seen mom and dad’s house since they painted it and built the new deck! It looks beautiful. Makes me really want a deck at our house, though.

• Things that scared Cailan: barking miniature Schnauzers, whirring miniature helicopters, moving miniature trains, horses, and of course the blender. Happily, he wasn’t terrified by any of his relatives, and after a few days he was even curious about the horses.

• In fact, he loved playing with Abbey and Quinn. All three kids played outside on Christmas afternoon. Abbey did a great job of keeping track of Cailan and including him in their games. He is still talking about playing hide and seek with Abbey. I wonder if Q & A are still singing the pachycephalosaurus song.

• Dinosaur songs. Cailan played songs on the piano, giving each a track number and dinosaur name. At Abbey and Quinn’s birthday party, he sang dinosaur songs (the name of a dinosaur, fit to a rhythm, and chanted over and over) while dancing around the table. Alan made up some dinosaur songs with him, one of which he is still repeating, to the tune of Oh Christmas Tree: Dei-non-y-chus, dei-non-y-chus, How tall are you, dei-non-y-chus

• We had a great trip to the zoo, where we saw the gorillas cavorting, chasing, wrestling, and doing somersaults. There were 2 young lion cubs hanging out with both parents and a 3-week-old giraffe baby. Cailan tried to read the signs at every exhibit.

• Cailan and I took a bike ride with Grandma and Grandpa. We had a picnic – although it was a warm day for December, there was a brisk wind, so we tried to shelter on the lee side of a big pine tree. Then we biked around the paths at Sedgwick County Park. I would have expected Cailan to be miserably cold in the wind, but he was having a great time.