Travel: Adventures In Babysitting [Day XXXII]

Wherein the brutality of human nature is revealed.  Also I pretend to be a dinosaur who lives in a piano.

About five years ago, Dana's brother Ben and his girlfriend eloped.  Dana was the only non-priest present the ceremony, which was on a remote beach.  They sent the family pictures after the fact as a wedding announcement.

For a story that starts out so sassy, their family life is pretty normal.  They live about a twenty minute drive from Mary in Pacific Palisades (the Pacific Palisades?  All the names here are slightly weird) with their in-house nanny and two little boys, Nathan and Leo.  I haven't had too much to do with them so far, but today Nathan came over to the house and Mary seemed wiped, so I took us out for a walk.

As it turns out, Nathan is a smart, funny, friendly kid.  We got into dinosaurs pretty quick - it's my safe topic of conversation with four year old boys.  And with them, anything can be a dinosaur, and anyone can be a dinosaur catcher.  We started with a Stegosaurus-box in the house and moved on to garbage cans, the piano, passing dogs, rocks in the creek, and cars.  Every time, we snuck up, 'caught' the dinosaur with the little green nets Mary uses to scoop debris out of her front-yard pond, asked it what we could do to improve its presumably peaceful dinosaur life, and moved on.

I did both the dinosaur voices - Gggh AArghzzzz RRR my throat hurts - and translation.  Nathan was basically Captain Kirk, violating the Prime Dinosaur Directive all over the place.  We transplanted dinosaurs (fallen leaves), fed dinosaurs (the garburator), hid under dinosaurs (the soccer net in the backyard), petted dinosaurs.  Several of the 'dinosaur owners' we encountered (poor unsuspecting folks walking their dogs) found this charming rather than crazy.  It helps to have a four year old along when you're doing this kind of stuff.

Things got weird when we approached a 'sleeping' dinosaur - a big empty black van on the curb.  Nathan said to sneak up on it, so we crawled forward until we were behind the back wheel.  I cautioned Nathan not to actually hit the wheel with his net, and he swiped the air obediently.  "ROOOAR!" went the dinosaur.

I left it up to Nathan.  "Did we catch him?"

Nathan nodded, then dropped the net.  He held his hands up in claw-shapes, and I figured he wanted a turn to be the dinosaur.  "Hello there, dinosaur car," I said.  He shook his head and twisted his hands away from each other.

"I'm not a dinosaur.  I'm killing it by twisting its neck so it can't breathe."

I was stumped, but made appropriate gurgling noises.  "Please let me go!"  I growled.  Nathan made a snap motion with his little hands.  "There, it's dead."  He looked proud.  "Can we go find another one?"

We got up and started to walk back towards the house.  "Was it a bad dinosaur?" I asked.

Nathan looked thoughtful.  "I guess it might have been.  Sometime."

We played for another half-hour, and Nathan killed every dinosaur we met.

Cheers
Julia