on persistent dreams & grown up plans

It varies, from week to week, from pilot, to engineer, to inventor. Though I guess they all have an engineering kind of common thread running through them. He’s a child who loves to know how things work, who’ll question and think and question some more. As a toddler, he spoke early and spoke constantly – especially “why?”. “Why why why why but why mummy? ” “because I said so and that’s why,” I replied, at the end of a particularly tedious conversation that saw us going around in circles and getting ourselves knotted up, “and no more asking why” “but mummy,” came the reply, “how come?”. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry! An inventor needs to be persistent, and so that was what he chose. The drawing is all his, as is the bottom left pose.

Where his brother was a train boy through & through, our little boy2 forged his own path from early on, and nothing, but nothing would sway him from his dinosaurs. For years now – at least two, probably more than three, from as soon as he knew what the word meant, and before he could really say it, he has wanted to be a paleontologist. Taking him to Winton in 2013, he was rendered speechless, literally, by the excitement of visiting Australian Age of Dinosaurs. The silence said more than any squeals could, with only the occasion call of “DINOSAUR!” from the back seat as he spotted the next sign to reassure us his actually was still there and breathing. The number of dinosaur dig kits we have bought would be well in the double digits, that’s all he wants to use his pocket money for. A paleontologist, he tells us, needs to be persistent because it can be hard to find the right kind of rocks, and it can be slow work getting the bones out so you don’t break them. You know, mummy, like the time I have the stegosaurus dinosaur digging and I whack it with my axe too hard and I broke his leg? It wouldn’t be good to do that with a real fossil, you know, mummy. I know, my love, I know.

These boys of mine. They are firm in their dreams & goals, and it makes me so happy to see them play-act their dearest wish. Maybe Bear will be an engineer to build the biggest bridge in the world. Maybe Boy2 will discover a new species of dinosaur. I love their enthusiasm & their passion, and so I spend my weekends sewing work shirts & lab coats, and encourage them to dream big, and look to a future where those dreams become real.

(costumes were created for school dress-up day with the theme of “persistence” – the shirt is sewn from Simplicity 1413A, and the lab coat is from the same pattern, with extra length added to the sleeves and hem. Everything else was clothes they already owned, or leftovers from previous costumes)