This Saturday the weather was great and my 4-year-old son (I like to call him The Boy) was playing in the backyard. I was in the basement finishing up a couple quick odd chores when I heard “Mommy, Daddy, come quick! Look at this!”
By the time I got to the kitchen, the skull was on the counter and The Boy, his 10-year old sister, and my wife were standing there marveling at it. “It must be a dinosaur bone!” “Wow, isn’t that cool!” “And you found it in the backyard?” “Yeah!”
My wife turned to me and mouthed “It’s a rat” so the kids couldn’t hear, I nodded and mouthed back “I know.”
The kids went out the back door to look for more dinosaur bones and my wife said “You know that’s a rat right?”
“Well, it might be a squirrel,” I replied. My wife reminded me of the rat that died in our backyard last fall and I remembered that awful smell.
Still, it was very cool to see that look of wonder in The Boy’s face. What kind of an evil bastard could ever tell a kid that the dinosaur skull that he found in his backyard is really a rat?
