"Will their skin come back on?"

This summer has been a bear. Lots of things to do and such a short time to accomplish any of them. You'd think that with both Jen and I working in schools and thus getting almost three months off during the summer that we could easily make a list of things to do and knock them off one by one. You could think that, but if you did it would be evidence that you clearly don't know who we are and how ridiculously good we are at procrastinating. For example, I have been putting off getting my brother David a college graduation present for about 11 years now.

One of the things that we have had on our list since late May is to take a family trip to the Field Museum in Chicago so Ryan could see the dinosaurs. We read a lot of books, and many of them have dinosaurs as the main characters. With all the counting, playing, chasing other dinosaurs, and learning their alphabet, the dinosaurs in his books lead very active lives. They also, without exception, all have skin. Muscles, bones, blood, and other connective tissues are assumed, but they all have skin.

He is very interested in animals and people that have skin. He is also very interested in what happens to the skin of the people and animals that shuffle off this mortal coil. We can be having a conversation about anything, and this subject will almost invariably crop up.

"Dad," he says.

"Yep," I respond.

"Why does Dash run so fast?" Dash is from the movie "The Incredibles" and is his new favorite person in the whole world. He talks about him and his movie almost nonstop.

"Well, Dash is a superhero, so he has powers that normal people don't have."

"Oh. Can I be a superhero?"

"No, not in real life. You can pretend to be a superhero if you like, though."

"Ok. Watch how fast I can run!" With this, he takes off around the living room making "VROOOM!" noises and running into things like chairs, his little brother Ethan, and the occasional wall.

"That is really fast," I exclaim. "Now, say sorry to your brother."

"Are you sure I'm not a superhero?"

"Yep. Pretty sure."

"Your dad died," he says, tactfully switching the subject.

Thankfully this is not news to me, as he has been dead for a few years now. "Yep. He did."

"His skin will come off and he will get all hard," says the four year old medical examiner. Apparently this is what you get when you make the mistake of answering a few questions truthfully. A few months ago he learned that the cat which lives at Nonnie's house was probably going to die soon, so he asked Jen and I a few questions about that. In order to answer his questions, we told him about the concepts of decomposition, rigor mortis, other facts of death which went into the little cement mixer that is his 4 year old brain and came out "skin off/hard body". Leave it to a little boy to break things down to their bare essence.

"This is true," I told him. I try not to elaborate or encourage more questions when he talks like this. Not yet, anyway.

"Lets go play soccer," he says, changing the subject yet again.

"Yes. Let's."

So on the way to the museum our little interrogator starts in with the questions about dinosaurs. "Are they all dead? Do they have skin? Why did they die? How old are they? Was the meteor that killed them alive? I'm four years old. Are they really 200 million years old? I'm not 200 million years old. Your dad is dead. Am I 200 million years old? How old is Ethan in millions of years? Who is bigger, me or a dinosaur? Why am I smaller than a dinosaur? Can a dinosaur run faster than Dash? Will their skin come back on?..." and so on. Never a dull moment in the car with that little one.

We cruised through the museum, eventually hitting the "Evolving Planet" exhibit where the dinosaurs are kept. He is too little to be really interested in the really cool stuff, like transitional fossils of tetrapod evolution, or the entire room dedicated to the evolution of humans and other hominids, but he did dig the large dinosaurs. He also loved the giant ground sloth and the other large mammals, and was even able to point out a red eyed tree frog and a macaw in their amazing picture gallery at the end of the exhibit. Overall, he seemed to get a kick out of the entire place which is exactly what we wanted to hear. Learning should be fun, and it appears that for him, at least for now and in this place, it was.

Now, if Jen and I would only learn to stop procrastinating we might be able to get to the zoo and Botanic Gardens in the few weeks we have left.