Nightmares About Dinosaurs—An Unusual Solution

Most children are fascinated with dinosaurs, and our boys are no exception. However, when David was three years old, he kept having recurring nightmares, from which he would awake screaming and generally require staying in bed with us, about dinosaurs.

To complicate matters, he kept begging to watch Jurassic Park, having seen the dinosaur pictured on the DVD case. Of course, given his nightmares (and having some negative leanings toward showing somewhat-violent programming to small children), we did not grant his request.

But the nightmares continued for weeks. Finally, I reasoned, he was already having nightmares about the dinosaurs, what harm could there be in letting him watch Jurassic Park? As I recall, we did skip over the scene where the T-Rex attacks the jeep with the kids in it.

After watching the film (actually, after watching all three JP films), his nightmares went away. Go figure.

The Fastest Computer

To quote a famous Bloom County comic strip: “Just what your four-year-old needs to compete in today’s cutthroat world of high-tech and high expectations…”

Nichelle here: We have a few people that come over to use our computers from time to time. One person, named Kherna, has used it on several different occasions. This morning David asked me, “which computer does Kherna use?” I pointed to the one on the right (we have two side-by-side), and his response was, “Why? That’s not the fastest!” I thought that was quite cute, seeing that he’s only 4 and knows the difference.

Out of the Mouth of Babes

As we reflected on the day we set aside to celebrate the Resurrection, Nichelle asked David (age 4) what he had learned in Sunday school. He talked about Jesus being buried described the tomb, and said, “Then Jesus used His ‘rise up power.’”

I don’t think I’ve ever heard an adult explain it better.

The keys for the what?

This morning Nichelle was extremely kind, and took Isaac to school so I could sleep about another hour—trust me, I needed to.

Anyway, around 8:00 am, David knocked on the door, and I told him to come in. He had a set of keys from some toy handcuffs that had come with a police role-playing kit he’d been given. Now, understand that David is quite advanced in his speech for his age, so I was ROTFL when he said, he had the keys, but couldn’t find the cheese puffs they went to.

Daaaaaaaaaaaagnabbit!

My workday ended with a whimper—demonstrating that I was missing a piece in my understanding of the data translator portion of the stuff we’re working on.

Then, I got an e-mail at home saying the CenterWatch project was not quite finished. Just a few revisions in the entire book, including two chapers that seem to have mismatched fonts.

At supper time, David’s question of the day was, “Where does the sun go at night?” His answer was quite interesting, more or less along the lines of the sun goes into space at night and comes out into the sky at daytime. There was something thrown in about gravity pulling it down. I demonstrated what really happens using a flashlight and a coffee cup, then remembered I had a globe in the basement, which would be even better for demonstration.

I got down in the basement to find 3 or more inches of water throughout, meaning that when John told me on Saturday the “thing was flooded” he meant it. (I thought we’d just had a puddle on the non-sump-pump end.)

After wrestling with the sump pump for a few minutes (thankfully it wasn’t bolted to the floor), I discovered the float on the float switch had become detached from the shaft. Now it’s back working, but life was full of surprises today.