Lucas Camilo

Having just wrapped up another dino-riffic weekend, I figured it might be time to illuminate all the ways in which our lives continue to be centered primarily around dinosaurs. Or at least that’s how Lucas would have it.

A typical morning in the Hanson-Stansbury household: one or both of us are woken up way too earlier by one or both of our early-bird children.  I struggle into the kitchen to put on the coffee and… “ouch!” Yup, there’s a particularly spikey plastic stegosaurus under my bare foot, apparently engaged in another unsanctioned herbivore convention on the dining room floor.  “Daddy! Daddy!” I hear from Lucas’s room. “Yeah buddy?”

“I want to listen to something!”

“Ok, how about one of your A to Z mysteries?”

“No, I want to listen to a Dinosaur World story!”

So I fire up a 20-minute audio book about some kids running around a zoo-like facility populated by dinosaurs, and get back to the coffee.

All too soon the story is over and the “daddy” chant has begun again — right as I’m sitting down to my coffee and morning newspaper. “What do you want to do now Lucas?” I sigh. It’s 6 am. The school bus doesn’t arrive for another two and half hours.

“I want to read something TOGETHER!” You guessed it, a dinosaur book. And so the morning continues, Ida and Krista joining us at some point and me occasionally jumping up to fire off emails to my east coast colleagues so they’ll think I’m working and not reading an ode to prehistoric creatures for the third time of the week.

This last weekend was especially dino-tastic.  It all started with a Friday evening lecture from Lucas’s paleontologist hero, Dr. Scott Sampson. Yes, that Dr. Scott (!!), the one from the PBS Kids series Dinosaur Train. (If you somehow don’t know of this brilliant man than watch this video immediately.)

The lecture on “Dinosaurs of the Lost Continent” was advertized for kids 10 and over but Lucas would not have missed it. He sat patiently through the whole thing, understanding parts of it, occasionally asking me questions, and making some jokes along the way as well (“Dr. Scott sure does like that picture!” Lucas said about a PowerPoint slide showing a map of North America during the late Cretaceous period that kept appearing on the screen behind him.) At the end of the lecture I jumped up on the stage and grabbed Dr. Scott before he sat down to start signing books.  I told him that my son was in a wheelchair and couldn’t come up on the stage– would he come over to say hi? He agreed wholeheartedly and came over and sat with Lucas and I for a few minutes as Lucas tried to explain that he had once seen a picture of a T-Rex with feathers (a reference from the lecture). A long line was forming but Dr. Scott didn’t seem phased. He asked if we wanted a picture but unfortunately I had left my camera in the car. Lucas will never forgive me, but we’ll always have the memory.

Needless to say, we were both pretty pumped up and star struck by hanging out with our hero. I have to admit that when Dr. Scott asked the crowd “who wants to be a paleontologist when you grow up?” that my hand shot up along with Lucas’s.  Because here’s the thing — after all the time we spend talking about and doing activities related to these creatures that died out 66 million years ago, I now realize that I am almost as fascinated by dinosaurs as Lucas is. Among other things, our exploration gets me ruminating about the enormous size and diversity of living creatures through the ages, about the nature of time and human habitation on the earth (compared to dinos and other prehistoric creatures), about the causes and consequences of mass extinctions… about everything that has brought us to this moment in the earth’s history.

So the truth is, the typical dino-filled morning (or afternoon, or evening) at our house doesn’t really bother me at all.  In fact, I love that our family is able to relate and be ridiculous through the vehicle of prehistoric creatures… not to mention through other funny things that Lucas obsesses over, from whales, to mystery books, to the Penguins of Madagascar, to Smurfs, to Caspar Babypants… but mostly dinosaurs.

So without further ado, here’s a not-so-exhaustive list of all the dinosaur related things we’re currently engaged in.

• Lucas and his nurse Katherine have been working for weeks on a dinosaur puppet show. Lucas wrote the script on his tablet, Katherine (who is a former architect and a creative genius) helped build the light-weight dino puppets that Lucas can hold, along with a small stage for him to lie behind while operating the puppets. Expect a video of the production coming soon.

• We attended our second annual “Dino Day” at the Burke Museum on Saturday and frankly the event was a little disappointing, mostly because it was so crowded and tough to maneuver the wheelchair around, or see the special exhibits. The highlight for Lucas, therefore, was picking up a new music CD titled “Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway” that I estimate to be our 13th album dedicated to dinosaurs and their time. Note: you can order Lucas’s Dino Greatest Hits, a compilation of the best songs from all those albums, at any time by commenting on the blog or sending me an email.

• We currently have a giant glass bowl in on our dining room table in which there are growing a pair or sauropods and a pair of therapods.  Thanks a lot Susie!

• Among other mysteries that we’re currently trying to solve around our house: Is Ida already or will she grow up to be a “dinosaur girl.”  We know that she loves dogs but the jury is still out on whether she’ll follow in her brothers footsteps and become a lover of prehistoric reptiles.  We’ll keep you posted!

• You’ll recall that Lucas wrote his first blog post a couple months back; not surprisingly, it consisted primarily of his own recently composed dinosaur poems

• Even when we venture out of the house we tend to stumble upon dinosaurs. For example, our big winter excursion to the Olympic peninsula led to a rare sighting of the infamous “Snow-a-saur” (see picture)

• In addition to the 13 dinosaur albums I mentioned, here are some important numbers to know: we have more than 150 miniature plastic dinosaurs; three battery-operated dinosaurs (including a roaring T-Rex and a talking ankylosaurus, both courtesy of our local Goodwill store); over 100 books devoted to dinosaurs or other extinct prehistoric creatures; two dinosaur board games and three dinosaur card games; about 10 dino puzzles, including some of the block and floor variety; a few dozen dinosaur apps on Lucas’s iPad; six dinosaur t-shirts (including his “Herbivore” shirt which I have an adult size of and which we sport outside together on special occasions); five dinosaur wall posters;  and four dinosaur/pterasaur medley videos created by Lucas and I which you can watch on youtube.

With spring coming, the dino adventures promise to continue. Soon we’ll be out scouring our neighbors’ driveways and back yards for “fossils” once again. And then this summer our plan is to rent a wheelchair accessible RV and drive through the Canadian Rockies to the tiny down of Drumheller, “aka the dinosaur capital of the world.” Disability makes it tough sometimes, but we do what we can to live up to Dr. Scott’s motto– “Get outside, get into nature, and make your own discoveries” — with the inspiration of dinosaurs leading the way.