Happy New Year (again)! I told you that one of my daughters thought this was the best Christmas ever. Part of that assessment came from the gift of this book, Encyclopedia Prehistorica Dinosaurs. This is an incredible book. If you can find a display edition somewhere, it’s worth spending ten minutes flipping through it. The primary illustrations leap off the page, and one of the secondary ones wrestles with itself. Of course since we are evolution-deniers, I shed doubt on certain age statements, and I criticized the section on why the dinosaurs died. What else can a father do? Now my girls throw around dinosaur names they can’t pronounce.
Another Christmas book which excites my older two girls is Starfinder, a neat book with a star chart on the cover. We tried to use this last night, while my oldest kept identifying constellations that weren’t there. I want to sit out in the back yard with them one night when the sky is clear. We’ll have to study this book ahead of time.
I encourage you to do that Phil. Watching the stars is one of the most rewarding (awe inspiring) things you can do. I once watched a star (placed against the foreground of a tree) and over an hour (while I listened to a Mozart concerto) I could see it move across the sky. It might sound simple, but it was an amazing experience; and one you can only have if you invest some patience.