Caution: Dinosaur Crossing Ahead

For almost two months now Sam has been devouring information about dinosaurs like never before. In fact, he was rather indifferent about them before. His obsession started when PapaBear let him watch bits and pieces of Jurassic Park and Sharon gave us the Disney movie, Dinosaur.
We've check out a bunch of books from the library and especially enjoyed the movie, Walking with Dinosaurs. My favorite one to read is called, Dino Hockey. So cute!!!

I bought, Sammy and the Dinosaur, at Once Upon a Child because of the boys name, but now it's a favorite. Grandma & Grandpa gave Sam a personalized dinosaur book for Christmas that I wish I could have found to put in this pile of books. The problem was I took this picture in the dark. We went in to check on Sam and found him like this:

His dinosaur nest literally at his fingertips while he slept. I had to run and get my camera and while I was there I snapped a photo of some of the books he chose to read tonight.

Yesterday I got a bee in my bonnet about getting Sam some dinosaurs to play with since he was constantly playing dinosaur. Selfishly I wanted to use toys instead of having to crawl around on my hands and knees all the time. That, and the kicking, pretend clawing, and bashing involved with dinosaur fighting was starting to concern me. Julia didn't care for the violence either and would get upset when Sam would cling to my leg and pretend to eat me.

I figured if we got the Toob of 15 dinos from Michaels for $7 we could call it a Valentine's gift that the kids could share. THEN I got to thinking that I should check Craigslist first. When I didn't find much on CL I went to Ebay. Holy dinosaurs Batman! We could get 100 for $15! That made us reconsider spending $7 on a few, but the desire to get him one right away won out.

We haven't bought the kids anything since Christmas and with as much use as they'll get we decided to go ahead and stop at Michaels Craft Store. I wish you could have seen the look on Sam's face when we told him he could get a dinosaur. He said he was going to pick a stegosaurus (that's what's on his PJ's). We decided to purchase this set off of Ebay for $12.50 as well.


Pretty much as soon as I hit "confirm" I started to question our decision.
What kind of example were we setting if we rushed out and bought something just because we liked it for the moment?
Why buy SO many when he would truly be happy with a couple?

But then I came to my senses and realized it was TWO MONTHS ago that we brought home our first dino book from the library. That's not exactly rushing out to buy something.
He didn't ask for dinosaur toys. He's just SO good at using his imagination when he plays that we wanted to encourage that. Notice we didn't get any battery operated ones. I guarantee he will play with these toys for a LONG LONG time.
When we told him he could get a dinosaur he requested one. We aren't going to spoil him with the entire set at once. I already have plans to set some aside for Easter. I'm going to put some of the littlest ones in the plastic eggs we have for their Easter Baskets.

Parents have to walk a fine line and I'm praying that our walk with dinosaurs will be an educational AND fun one.