disclaimer: i'm not very good at writing about my kid's early years when they went by a different name, pronouns, and gender. i really hope i don't offend said kid in telling these stories. felix, you're my inspiration in a lot of ways...forgive your ol' ma now. i love your face.
part of being a kid is finding joy in the smallest things. learning about new things, hyper fixating on those things. as a parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, bonus mama, one of the great joys is learning your little person's fixation and contributing to it. as a mom, i've bought roughly a zillion books, toys, experiments, art supplies, you name it, with the mission of learning about whatever my kiddo was into.
it just so happens that those things were: dinosaurs, lizards, and penguins.
i'm not sure how kiddo got into dinosaurs. maybe it was watching the land before time. maybe it was something on noggin. maybe it was one random purchase of a t-rex that turned into this obsession. it started around age two. kid had a duffle bag full of dinosaurs. they went everywhere. there were two special ones even: a giant t-rex named (what else?) rexy and a giant stegosaurus named, you guessed it: steggy. those dinosaurs were life. we read books about dinosaurs. we watched tv shows both fictional and theoretical about dinosaurs, types, extinction theories, and if birds are direct descendants of dinosaurs (or vice versa, idk). by the time the kid was 3 or 4 he could name every single dinosaur known to man. he could pronounce in his own way all of their names, even if we couldn't.
every human being associated with this kid knew that dinosaurs were life. every gift had a dinosaur attached. we all looked for dinosaur clothing. we toted those dinosaurs, books, toys back and forth from dad's to my house to nannie's to granny's. my mom, his nannie, created dinosaur books with him, read to him, watched national geographic and nova shows with him. my former mother in law, his granny, did the same.
he was totally consumed with being a paleontologist. this lasted for years as a child and continues somewhat to this day. kid still reads books about the start of the eras and when and how dinosaurs roamed the earth. it's remarkable. it's not often you have a person who continues a quest for knowledge from such a young age into adulthood like he has. now, instead of wanting to study dinosaurs, he draws them, makes block prints of them, creates comics about them. the evolution of this has been so fun to watch.
lizards and penguins were laced into this era of animal learning. they were really secondary characters to the dinos, obviously. lizards were the modern day dinos, so that made sense. penguins were the random addition, but i think that was all from watching happy feet, pingu, and surf's up.
i tell you this to preface this story about mom and her dedication to my kiddo. mom and rachel (the other granny) took care of annie (now felix) from the moment i went back to work up till they started preschool. mom was very much a reading, writing, creating type of nannie. she did a lot of that with us kids when were little too. they made books about dinos, lizards (lizy's) and penguins (pingus) that i keep finding around the house to this day. those are some very precious pieces that i treasure.
all of that said (sorry it took so long), one day mom and annie went to the salvation army in town. kiddo saw the biggest penguin ever sitting on top of the racks. mom knew it was a ridiculous purchase. this thing was every bit as big as the kid was at the time. she figured the price of it would be such that she could get away with not buying it. that said, they ended up checking it out (because grands get what grands want, duh) and come to find out, this glorious penguin was only five whole dollars. what's five whole dollars? of course she bought it and annie promptly and lovingly named it penny.
penny became as much a part of the family as the bag of dinosaurs, the 50 books about dinosaurs, and all the other random stuff that the kid carried everywhere with them. she slept with him every night, taking up half the bed, she went everywhere he did. penny currently still lives in annie's childhood bedroom, and will be there for the foreseeable future.
i so wish that annie (felix) had more time with their nannie. i wish that she would have been around to see what that kid has become. i know mama would be so proud of him. they had a really special bond, that's for sure. in telling these stories in snippets, i hope that it serves as a way for him to remember her and know more about her life as well as all of our other family members.
the way we support our kids, grandkids, nieces, nephews, and bonus kids becomes part of who they are. imagine what felix would be like if we all told him dinosaurs were silly. i can't imagine a world where that kid and dinosaurs didn't go hand in hand, a world where there was no penny the penguin.
friends, think about the kids in your life--how will you support the magic for them? how will you create that bond? i hope that the young people in your life get to have that penny the penguin moment--it's totally worth taking up half the bed for.
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