Fearlessness
Lillian’s very favorite thing to do is grab your two forefingers and let herself be pulled to her feet from a sitting position. Once upright, she will stand there gripping your fingers, wobbling from her middle and occasionally trying to jump up off your lap. She can do this for quite a while. She has also been connecting sounds with meaning, a little. She likes to hear me whistle, I’ve noticed. It almost always gets a smile. Sometimes she reaches toward my face as if to try to grab the sound and feel it. This Tuesday she and I were sitting in the back yard watching Laura and her friend Elena play in the hammock. There was an explosion of noise from what must have been a dozen or so birds in a tall bushy tree in the neighbors’ yard, and Lillian jumped to her feet, breathing quickly, looking around for the source, wide-eyed and grinning. Then she forgot all about it and went back to biting my knuckle.
Laura is pretty sure she is going to be a paleontologist. A couple of months ago her teachers buried some bones in the sandbox at school and had the kids dig them up. Laura claims she knew they were cow bones all along, but still the experiment seems to have grabbed her imagination. She knows the names of a frightening number of dinosaur species and is willing to talk about them for an hour at a time. (I keep remembering the time we were at the Natural History Museum in London, two summers ago. Laura spent a half hour glaring at the life-size animatronic roaring Tyrannosaurus Rex from as close as the guards would let her get, and shouting, “I’m not afraid of you!”)
The other night she and I were looking around on the web for new dinosaur pictures and found out, surprise, that there were a bunch. (They say the web has gone mainstream in the last couple of years, but it’s still pretty geeky out there. If you could count up all the JPGs on the web, I’d bet dinosaur pictures would come in third, after space pictures and pornography.) My own favorite was the site with all the ocean dinosaurs. There’s something about those plesiosaurs that always gets me. We got a lot of black-and-white pictures for coloring from this very scholarly site, and we liked this slightly whimsical but exhaustive site too. We printed some of them them out and when Mary came home we pretended that we’d been out with our camera and taken our own pictures. It seemed like she was buying it, for a minute there.
Categorised as: Laura, Lilly, Read this to me