Bigger is Not Always Better

Everyone,

Before we had kids and we had money to spend on frivolous things for each other, I bought Juice a mechanical dinosaur. A raptor. It's interactive. When you turn it on, it growls, sniffs around and can follow things. (No picture because it's way late (again!) and I don't want to find it/take a picture of it.)

Soot (our dog) thought it was a being of great evil descended on our household. She barked loudly at it but also ran from it a great deal. We named it Bunny.

It also came with a tiny version of itself that walked. It was Juice's toy for a long time, but then it somehow became the kids' toy. The dinosaur, which Butterfly named Bob, is very sought after in my house. Professor really loves it and calls it a "rarrr".

The other day, Juice decided to bring down Bunny to show the boys. They had never seen the big one before. Professor had been hauling around his "rarrr" for a few days at that point. When Juice showed him Bunny, he threw down Bob with a resounding thud.

You could just see him look at the one in his arms, and say, "Yours is bigger! I'll take it!"

Then Juice flipped the switch and Bunny roared. Poor Professor ran sobbing from the room and won't go near Bunny now. (He still loves the little dinosaur.) Bunny is on the top shelf in our closet and he will go over to the closet and point and talk about the big one. But don't take it down! He likes to look at it from a distance.

Pirate thinks Bunny is great. We had to tell him that Bunny was tired and needed sleep or he would play with him all day. Pirate has also made up his own sign for sleep because of this conversation that I have repeated at least 30 times. He lays his head over to the side and sighs really big. Yes, sleep!

Speaking of signs, Pirate says very few words still. He signs A LOT though. And most of them he's thought up himself. Other signs he knows the "proper" way of doing is eat, drink, cereal, more, all done, milk, car, mommy, daddy, baby. It's amazing what you can say in a day with those 10 signs.

Safire