Friday, November 13, 2009

How Not to Encourage Your Child to Like Dinosaurs

J loves dinosaurs, or "sows" as he calls them. He has dinosaur books and dinosaur jammies, and he delights in pointing out the "sows" on his shoes. I thought it would be neat to show him the big, red, roaring dinosaur they have on display at Target.

Apparently seeing something that is your size roaring and stomping around is pretty scary. Even scarier than that is showing him a small, molded plastic dinosaur that neither roars nor moves as an effort at demonstrating that not all dinosaurs are scary. That sent J into such a terror that people actually came from the next aisles over to look at me and see what I had done to my child, because surely only a child that is actively being abused cries like that. I told J I was sorry and carried him around a bit, but I may have gotten him off the dinosaur kick. I also managed to thoroughly terrify him of going down any aisle in the toy department. Oops. Well, you live, you learn.

1 comment:

Caeseria said...

I am so glad some other mom has these experiences. We dragged Kittyboy to a steam show before remembering he was terrified of fire, and what makes steam, but...? I also thought when he was about a year, that he would enjoy watching the blender go WHEE so I picked him up before pressing the button. Sadly, the blender drowned out his screams of terror, so I only realized that I was in fact traumatizing my baby when I looked at him and saw his face red and scrunched and eyes streaming. Very sad. Bad Mommy.