At least when it comes to monsters.
My son has been researching his assigned biome of the rainforest. He came home from school last week proudly announcing that there is a kind of Amazonian fish that can swim inside your body while you are peeing and live on your blood. Ever patient, ever encouraging father that I am, I immediately told him that he must have misread his information, and that what he was talking about is surely some microscopic parasite.
He told me that I am absolutely wrong and that I don't know everything.
Obnoxiously, however, I often convince myself that I DO in fact know everything, including the fact that internal parasites are invertebrates, NOT fish.
Of course I was wrong. He came home today with a printout of this link on the candiru.
I bought him ice cream and apologized for acting like a jerk.
PS Moral of the story -- besides the fact that I am a failure as pater -- is that this gruesome fish is surely a monster ... talk about category violation. I share this information because I am so busy indexing my book that I haven't been able to post another blog about animals as promised.
3 comments:
By all means, do remind your kiddo that rainforests aren't all tropical. Behold: Canada's newest national park, Great Bear, the park of the temperate rainforest:
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=c2b9824c-7149-4bd9-9ee3-da751ca949c4&k=27605
Shoot! That didn't appear the way I wanted it to appear, with a link and all. If you go to the Vancouver Sun web site and do a search for "temperate rainforest" you'll get all the news about the rainforest. (The Washington Post also ran a piece about it yesterday or the day before.)
Indeed. The Washington State Peninsula (the thumb portion of the hand if you make a Washington State shape)) is a temperate rainforest.
Here’s as good a place as any to share a moment with the elder (3-year-old) nephew. We’d bought him a plastic dinosaur toy with which he (lil’ D) was merrily stomping about. I asked, “What do dinosaurs say?” His answer: “Thank you.”
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