My paleontologist

Every day Oliver amazes me with how much he knows, how much he is aware of what is going on, and how quickly he learns -- what happens in the mind of a two year old, and what a two year old's mind is capable of simply astounds me.

In addition to his love for things that go superfast, Oliver is very much in to dinosaurs. Not only has he memorized the names of a good many of the dinos, but he can also identify them - and cross-reference them in his dino books. Yesterday morning though my budding paleontogist threw me for a loop - I desperately needed 20 minutes to get dressed and throw in some laundry and so I decided to let Oliver have a special treat - TV. He's normally not allowed to watch TV, and if he does it is either Curious George or snipetts of his two movies (Finding Nemo and Madagascar). Anyway, George wasn't on and he didn't want to watch the movies. Desperately wanting to begin our day I caved and found a show called "Dinosaur Train." Feeling guilty I headed upstairs. Moments later I heard running. Of course this brought me, running, back downstairs. It turns out Oliver had just gone to get one of his books about dinosaurs so that he could match the dinos on the TV to the ones in his book.

When "Dinosaur Train" was over Oliver had me sit with him and he went through his book and named all of the dinos he'd seen on TV and told me which were meat eaters and which were plant eaters. He also told me that his favorite dino was diplodocus and that Percy's (his train) favorite dino was either gigantosaurus or allosaurus - Percy hadn't yet decided.