Tell me if you see a Dinosaur

This morning on the way to preschool, Hunter casually said "Mom, tell me if you see any Tyrannosaurus Rexes or Brontosauruses as he gazed intently out the window. I chuckled and said "ummmm...ok" assuming we were pretending. A minute later I gazed back to see him intently peering our the window with his pointer finger tapping against his chin. My brow furrowed as I realized he was serious.

First off, I thought it was so cool that my 4 year old, who has a slight lisp and struggles with much of his vocabulary, could spit out two very hard names of dinosaurs. Who had taught him that? We haven't read any books about that lately. It must be from preschool or the new dinosaur version of power rangers. How awesome that he knows about dinosaurs and can identify which is which.

I sat there watching him look out the window searching for a T-Rexes pondering how on earth I was going to break the news to him. I rationalized it thinking, "surely, he isn't REALLY serious, right?" but then it was confirmed a minute later when he asked, "Mom, when will I get to go ride on a tyrannosaurus?"

Insert second cool thing. I love that we have taught our son that anything is possible if you work hard for it. We try really hard to ask our kids what their dreams are and how they are setting goals to make it a reality. The way he asked was very similar to "When are we going to disneyland again".

But I did have bring him back to reality. When I started to explain the current state of dinosaurs his face fell into the saddest puppy dog face. I had shattered his world. I thought for a minute that he was going to deny my claims because he was so convinced I was wrong, but he did believe my words as truth... sad, sad truth.

We tied up the conversation by saying maybe in heaven someday we can meet some dinosaurs to which he pleasantly replied "And will I get to feed them?". I saw no reason why not so I told him "I think you probably could feed the nice ones".

There are so many ways I can apply this to what the lesson might be. For now, I will focus on teaching our children and how the Lord teaches us "Line upon line". As we teach our children, we need to make sure we are teaching line upon line, and not skipping basics that we assume are common knowledge. With my older 3 kids I did not have a problem with this. But as I see my youngest two grow up, I'm starting to struggle, "Have we talked about this with this child, or was that with the others?"

How do you keep the basics fresh and teachable while the olders review it?