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If you’re not freaking out, you’re either not the parent of a girl or you’re not paying attention.

A study released earlier this week in the Journal Pediatrics found that more girls are showing signs of puberty at the ages of seven or eight than ever before.

Seven or eight??

There are plenty of articles out there in which you can read about the study’s findings, which were broken down by race and compared to earlier studies.  (Here are two articles: “Early Puberty is Raising Health Concerns,” USA Today; “First Signs of Puberty Seen in Younger Girls,” The New York Times.)  Two primary factors are cited as causes for the increased early onset of breast development and other signs of puberty: the rise in obesity, because body fat produces estrogen; and the still-debated role of environmental chemicals like BPA, found in products we use every day that might mimic estrogen’s effects. 

As the parent of a five-year-old daughter, the idea that she might reach puberty in two years terrifies me.  I know my daughter’s cognitive and emotional development level, and I watch my eight-year-old son’s female classmates and consider their maturity levels, too.  Nowhere in that mix do I find children ready to cope with the swirling confusion that one generally associates with kids in middle school: trying to understand the changes in your own body while sorting through feelings you’ve never had before; looking at members of the opposite—or your own—sex in ways you hadn’t previously and wondering what that means; managing advances from boys and men who see you in ways they didn’t before; and dealing with anger, sadness, and other emotional highs and lows in spectrums that radiate in multiple dimensions and in rapid, dizzying succession. 

All of this is hard enough to go through at eleven, twelve or thirteen.  I know I wasn’t ready for it then and it kicked my ass.  But at seven?  Right now, my daughter deals with her world by filtering all of life’s events, large and small, through her stuffed unicorn.  “Unicorn had a bad day.  She broke her leg and had to go the hospital,” she told me last night.  “It hurt, and she cried, but the doctor put a band-aid on it and made it better.  Now she’s going to rest and she’ll be better tomorrow.  But don’t make noise because she needs a nap.”  This is how “Emmie” copes with her world at the age of five, and two years just aren’t enough to go from the Unicorn crutch to breasts and periods.  She won’t be ready in two years—and neither will I.

On an individual level, we parents can only do so much.  We can try to keep our daughters healthy and minimize chemical exposure.  Realistically, for most of us, participating in modern life means that some exposure is inevitable.  But maybe we can do one step better than we do now.  Look at your child’s diet and cut back on just one serving of fat or sweets per day.  Check into your household-product consumption until you find one thing that might expose your child to BPA or some other potentially harmful chemical, and get rid of it.  Maybe that will be the item that makes that keeps your kid an actual child for just a little bit longer.

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It’s no secret to any reader of this blog that I’m on a mission to get kids to want to read—especially my kids.  And I’m guessing I’ve got lots of company amongst all the parents and teachers out there.

This job becomes easier if we can figure out ways to make reading fun.  While the definition of “fun” varies for each child—this explains why I am currently reading an encyclopedia of prehistoric life to eight-and-a-half year-old “Jack” at bedtime—some books have delighted kids over decades or engrossed so many children within months of publication that it’s clear they’re good ones to at least consider trying out with your own child. 

The problem is that we’re all so busy that even if we’d like to spend hours poring over the shelves of our local bookstore or library, most of us just don’t have that kind of time.  So I’m going to connect you with a few people who’ve done some of the winnowing for you.  If you look in the “Pages” box in the right margin of my blog, you’ll see a new page called “Resources: Great Books for Your Kids.”  Click on the page and you’ll find links to my own Shelfari page as well as several fabulous lists and sites put together by other books folks, all with an eye toward making it easier to connect kids with books they’ll love. 

I hope to add to this page in the future as I discover more resources.  Feel free to help me by sending me any info you think I should know about (contact info is on the Page).  I hope you find some of these resources useful and that you get as excited about about some of these books as I did.

GO TO THE NEW PAGE: GREAT BOOKS FOR YOUR KIDS

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Note: for the rest of the summer, I will continue to blog on this once-per-week schedule.  You know how it is: the kids are around a lot, I’ve got no air conditioning so I’m literally sweating onto my keyboard and I’m engaged in serious organization and planning so that I can work my butt off once the kids are back in school.  (Wouldn’t it be awesome if that idiom could be literal?)  So one blog post per week until September.  Unless, you know, I decide I have something extra to share that just can’t wait.

In case you haven’t noticed, it’s summer!

Okay, if you’re going to aim something at my head in response to my sarcasm, make it an ice-water filled spray bottle or the garden hose.  Please.  Because as we all know: crikey, it’s hot out there.

Because we’re so deeply into the summer heat, most of us are desperately searching for ways to cool off and to keep ourselves and our kids amused and happy without turning into simmering puddles of goo.  This completely understandable desperation can lead to a touch of carelessness here and there, as it did with me, yesterday, when I didn’t argue strongly enough with my son to get his eight-year-old butt OUT OF THE LAKE so I could reapply his sunscreen.  I was so hot, and he was happy, cool and having fun, and I gave in.  Today, my blond-haired, blue-eyed, pale-skinned boy is bright red.  Parenting fail.

With that incident and other summer activities in mind, here are a few areas where it’s important for parents to be aware of the facts and not let your guard down. 

• “Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning”  – Please read this piece.  I had no idea that a person drowning exhibited the signs (or lack thereof) discussed in this article, despite the fact that last year, one town over from my own, a young child drowned in a city pool while lots of people were present, including lifeguards and at least one of the child’s parents.
• Reapply sunscreen every two hours; use a waterproof variety if your kids will be sweating or cavorting in water.  Why?  See paragraph above for what I failed to do yesterday.  Short-term discomfort and long-term skin health problems can be the consequences of failing to do this
• Use bug spray in the woods, and check for ticks.  I know that a variety of opinions exist about this, and if you despise deet, I respect that.  I’m not a big fan myself.  But we live in the woods, my son loves hiking in forests and with past years’ outbreaks of EEE and West Nile Virus in mind, we use bug spray.  And don’t forget to check for ticks after you’ve been under trees.  Check everywhere; ticks don’t necessarily settle on your body where they land.  Last year I had to take my son to urgent care to have an embedded tick removed from his, well, private area.  If that doesn’t teach you a lesson, nothing will.
• Don’t leave kids in the car unattended. At all.  Every summer, we read about kids who die because their parents left them in the car “for just a minute or two.”  This is so heart-wrenching because it doesn’t have to happen.  Remember that the interior of a parked car in the sun can reach 130 degrees or more in just ten minutes.  You can plug in all sorts of variables and play with that number, but the bottom line is that it’s just not safe to leave kids (or pets) in your car.  For some reason, when we’re going somewhere, my kids like to climb into the car in the garage and wait for me, and I have warned them that they are absolutely forbidden to do this during the summer.  They’ve disobeyed me twice and the scoldings have been severe.  (When safety is involved, Mean Mommy comes out—you betcha.)
• Speaking of pets, don’t forget about Fido and Fluffy, because they’re suffering from the heat, too.  (And they have to wear those dang fur coats.)  Here are some “Hot Weather Tips” for pets from our friends at the ASPCA.
• Food safety.  Summer has its own cuisine; it’s part of the magic of the season.  But food poisoning can put a damper on your celebrations, so spend a couple of minutes checking out this “quick summer food safety guide” from Svelte Gourmand.

Ugh.  What a lot of rules.  But like I tell the kids, learning and integrating these rules into our lives is important so that we can be safe and have a good time.  However, some rules can be tossed out the window and it’s SO much fun to be rebellious, especially if you’re a young kid.  When it’s 95 degrees outside, I say there’s nothing wrong with ice cream for dinner or ice cream twice a day.  (And parents, the calories don’t count, either.)  Turn the hose on each other in your clothes.  Stay up late to enjoy the cool(er) night air.  Do things backwards (dinner for breakfast, dessert before the meal, wear your shirt backwards, call your kids by each others’ names).  Sleep downstairs on the floor if that’s where the cooler air is.  Kids, spend an hour telling your parents what to do.  Parents, whine at your kids for an hour.  And just have fun!

(Photo credit: Ozyman via Flickr.com)

By now you’ve figured out that I’m on a mission to get kids to love reading.  Okay, I’m on a mission to get my kids to love reading, and I’ll take as many other kids with them as I can.  Aside from all of the obvious educational benefits, the lifetime advantages of being able to teach yourself anything you want, etc., a child who likes to read owns a perpetual cure to the problem of being bored.

Don’t tell me you haven’t heard it by now.  Your kid, age five to, I don’t know, twenty, has approached you at some point since school let out and whined (or muttered with an accompanying eye-roll) “I’m borrred.”  This might have occurred in your house, surrounded by must-have, expensive toys; or in the car, attached to iPod earbuds and heaped with DVD cases and other amusements purchased for a road trip.  It could have been anywhere.  You can assign some chores to your complaining child in this situation—I have done this more than once—but then what?

Read, kid.  Read.

One practical problem for parents today is that you might not be sure what books to recommend to your child.  You can, of course, approach your local librarian or independent bookseller (and I’d advise doing this; in my house, my personal advocacy of a book to my kid is that volume’s seal of doom, a near-guarantee that my child will never want to read it).  These folks always have great ideas for your kids, and they often run attractive, incentive-based summer reading programs, too.

If you’re looking for some ideas without leaving your computer, check out this post from writer Kathy Crowley at one of my favorite writing blogs, Beyond the Margins.  Kathy introduces us to books she’d forgotten about from childhood, and “new books that I would never have even tried if I didn’t have children.”  Most of these titles are best suited to the eight-and-up crowd, but one or two might appeal to slightly younger audiences.

I do have one caveat to offer with regard to reading as a salve for summer boredom.  If you’re going to encourage your children to read in the car on road trips, then make sure you take care of their other needs, too.  If you, say, forget to feed them for a few hours, don’t ensure that they are adequately hydrated and just keep letting them read in the backseat of a moving vehicle—especially when it’s hot out—things will eventually get ugly.  Trust me on this one; I know.

Do you have any titles for kids—of any ages—you would like to recommend for summer reading?  Check out my Shelfari bookcase in the right margin for some of my family’s favorites, and please feel free to share your own suggestions in the comments.

Photo credit: CreativeCommons.org/Flickr.com/mhaithaca

It’s day three of Passover, and if you’re observing the holiday, please take a moment to participate in this unscientific little poll: if you’re already sick of matzah, raise your hand.

Yup, that’s everybody except my eight-year-old son, “Jack.”  Well, bully for him.  As for the rest of us, here are a few ideas that may help get you through the rest of the week.  Maybe one or two will be new and inspiring for you.  Feel free to add your own ideas in the comments.

• Nutella;
• Make-your-own matzah pizzas (400-degree oven, spaghetti sauce, cheese, vegetable and meat toppings and your imagination);
• Charoset truffles (use up that leftover charoset or make the one in this recipe from Mac & Cheese);
• Nutella with sliced bananas or strawberries;
• Hummus (yes, for the matzah)
• Quinoa (I am aware that some Jews will not accept this during Passover.  No theological arguments here, please.  Trust me, if you take issue with my consumption of quinoa during Passover, you’ve got a very large list of objections to my interpretation of the religion to tackle before we ever get to this one.  Hey, I’m Reform.  It’s all open for debate anyway, right?); and
• Did I mention Nutella?

If none of those suggestions make the bread of affliction more appealing, then perhaps something with a literary flavor will turn your mind in a more savory direction.  The Christian Science Monitor ran an article the other day entitled “What to Read for Passover,” and it offered several intriguing suggestions for both adults and children.  (Stop that.  I’m serious.  This is not an April Fool’s joke.)  We actually own the children’s book, The Yankee at the Seder, by Elka Weber, and it’s a surprising and educational read for the whole family. 

Okay, I’m off to sweep up matzah crumbs.  Remember, I’ve got an eight-year-old boy in the house, so the only thing more certain during Passover than growing weary of eating matzah is becoming truly sick of following my son around with a broom and dustpan so I can clean up the trail of unleavened crumbs he leaves wherever he goes.  Only five more days of this nonsense, and then we can return to normal.

Oh, Mid-Atlantic, I feel your pain.  No, really, I do, because I lived almost half my adult life in the D.C. area and I know what happens when it snows there.  It’s not pretty.  School superintendents’ fingers begin hovering above the “No School” button as soon as there are rumors of incoming flakes.  A quarter-inch of accumulation means that you take your life in your hands every time you drive your car.  (If you learn nothing else from all this snow—once it’s plowed—remember this: for the love of God, DO NOT SLAM ON THE BRAKES when you start to skid.)  Things have improved a lot from the days when I worked on Capitol Hill and a few inches were enough to shut down the government—I have very fond memories of sledding behind the dormant, snowfall-hushed Capitol on trays we borrowed from the U.S. Senate cafeteria when all but the hardiest souls were wrapped in blankets in their group townhouses—but three feet?  OMG.  I hope you made it back from Giant and Safeway with lots of toilet paper, bread and milk and are right now nice and warm in your living room or kitchen, trying to pacify your restless kids while you figure out what to do with your time given that nothing but last year’s transportation hearings are being shown on C-Span.

One thing you can do if the roof of your house is not well-sloped is get out on the roof and shovel off the snow.  No, I’m not kidding.  We do it all the time up here.  Being trapped in your house for a few days is one thing.  Having to dig out from a roof cave-in and replacing the roof and everything in your house once spring comes is quite another.

Of course, as my New England readers know, the irony of this situation is that we wouldn’t mind a little snow up here.  The half-inch we got yesterday was nice in that it covered the large, brown patches, but it doesn’t really make for good sledding and skiing.  None of those nor’easters that took out the mid-Atlantic have shown their faces in the real northeast.  And while I’m not exactly complaining, the whole thing does seem a bit weird, doesn’t it?

(Yeah, I know.  Local friends, when we get pounded in late April, you can blame me for tempting fate.  But maybe Pat’s Peak will give me a complimentary pass for a day of tubing?)

Given that we northern New Englanders are being deprived of our usual tools for winter entertainment of the kiddos, it’s fortunate that this weekend brings with it a host of non-snowy opportunities for fun.  It’s a crazy weekend in our observe-everything-we-can household.  It’s Valentine’s Day, Lunar New Year and the beginning of the Winter Olympics all at once.

Let’s dispense with Valentine’s Day first, as this is the member of the trio about which I am least enthusiastic.  The kids picked out cheap Valentines for their classes at Target, I pasted their butts to chairs to get them to fill them out, and today or tomorrow they will bring them to school and trade them in for a couple of dozen other cheap Valentines and bags full of candy to contribute to an early onset of tooth decay in my eight-year-old son’s emerging adult teeth.  Yeah, Valentine’s Day is overrated.

On to Lunar New Year, known in Korean as Solnal.  If you’ve heard of Chinese New Year or the Vietnamese Tet, this is the same holiday.  It’s one of the two biggest Korean holidays and one we celebrate at home.  We’ll attend a thematic party or two, and four-and-half year old “Emmie” will show off her new hanbok (traditional Korean dress) at each of them.  I’ll make the traditional duk guk (rice cake soup; Cecilia Hae-Jin Lee’s recipe in Eating Korean is awesome).  We get to spend time with friends and eat terrific food; what could be better?

And as if that weren’t enough for one weekend, we’re getting all excited about watching the winter Olympics.  My kids weren’t old enough to appreciate the winter Olympics four years ago, and here are my predictions: Emmie will be enthralled by the figure skating, and eight-year-old “Jack” will pronounce ski jumping to be the coolest thing he’s ever seen, seconded only by luge and skeleton.  And my husband will make us watch curling.  (Please let curling only be broadcast when I am sleeping.  Oh, damn, we have a DVR.)

Also, because I am a geek, we’re going to turn the opening ceremonies into a fun learning opportunity.  (Oh, quit your groaning.)  We dined on Chinese food on the floor of the living room while we watched the Beijing ceremonies last time; this time, I’ll be making salmon, wild rice and Nanaimo bars.  We’ll find Vancouver on the globe, maybe put together a North America puzzle, and ring in the Olympics in style.  Because that’s the kind of family we are.

One more thing: I hear Vancouver is actually hurting for snow.  So D.C., Baltimore and Philly folks: if you could just send a foot or two of your fluffy, white stuff up their way, they’d really appreciate it, eh?

Is anybody else out there parent to a cranky eight-year-old boy?  You know what I mean: full of joy and enthusiasm at being parent to such a sweet, engaging child, you eagerly walk to the bus stop to greet your charming offspring the moment he comes off the bus.  But what emerges from the school bus isn’t the kid you were looking for.  Someone else stomps up the driveway and drags his feet through muddy slush piles.  This sour child immediately begins an interrogation-and-complaint session.

“Do you have a chocolate chip cookie for me?  Why not?  Are you ever gonna have a chocolate chip cookie for me?  School was fine.  I already told you, I like recess best.  No, I didn’t play with M___ today.  Why do you always ask me that?  I don’t wanna do my homework.  Everything hurts ‘Emmie’s’ feelings.  She always says bad stuff to me.  I don’t wanna read a book.  Why don’t I ever get to do anything fun?”  And so on.  (Note: for full effect, you must imagine each of these sentences uttered in the octave of a mosquito that whines up and down the octave scale as it searches for the perfect, fingernail-scraping-down-a-blackboard pitch.)

Until recently, my first response to these periodic episodes was to adopt a stern, teacher-mommy voice as I reminded him of previous conversations.  “Tone, ‘Jack.’”  “That is not an appropriate way to speak to your mother.”  “Haven’t we talked a million times about the whining?  That’s enough.”  But often, these admonitions only earned me pouting and tears in addition to the whining.

Then, a few weeks ago, following a particularly unpleasant episode wherein a bitter Jack listed all of the ways I had allegedly treated him unfairly that day (like ordering him to stop playing on the computer because it was time for him to set the table), the four of us sat down to dinner.  Jack began shoveling food into his mouth in that particularly graceful manner common to eight-year-old boys—the manner that makes you glad you sit next to him at the table, not across from him, so you don’t actually have to watch.  Fifteen minutes later, I noticed something interesting: Jack was cheerful, laughing and silly again.  He was that kid whose company I actually enjoy.

So I began an experiment: every time Jack the Grouch made an unexplained appearance, I shoved food at him.  And every single time, it worked.  Mr. Hyde transformed into Dr. Jekyll, and all it took was a giant bowl of cereal.

I don’t know why I was so slow to realize that my son’s crabbiness is often a result of hunger.  I’m the same way: if I’m hungry and I don’t deal with it immediately, I get bitchy.  My sister displays this reaction as well.  A college friend has long been known to have a dark side known as “Metabolism Man”; he’s a great guy unless he’s hungry.  Then either you find the man some food or remove yourself to a separate room until the problem is addressed.  This physiological reaction is not new to me.

So why did it take me so long to figure out this connection with respect to Jack?  I’m not sure—it could just be that I’m slow on certain things—but I think the difference here is that when we adults are hungry, we recognize that and understand that we need to do something about it.  To my mind, if my kid is hungry, he’s going to tell me he needs to eat.  But that assumption appears to be incorrect.  Jack’s mind is occupied with critical matters like dinosaur traits, soccer games, truly idiotic eight-year-old boy jokes and the quest to discover new palindromes.  (Seriously.)  Basic needs sometimes don’t fit into that puerile mix, and I honestly believe that the kid doesn’t realize he’s hungry.

And that’s where his mother comes in.  If he doesn’t recognize the rumbling in his stomach, then I’ve got to teach him that when he feels like the world has suddenly turned against him, the first thing he needs to do is eat.  I also need to teach him that even when he’s hungry, he has to rein in the whining, the complaining and the accusations, but the truth of the matter is that there isn’t any point to even having those conversations with him until he gets some food in his stomach—often a sizeable quantity of food—and transforms back into a rational child.

So if you are visited sometimes by an inexplicably surly version of the child you love and you’ve been scratching your head trying to figure out where he comes from, especially in that shaky, mid-to-late-afternoon period, consider giving him a snack.  An apple or some cheese and crackers might just give you your child back. 

What about you?  Might you have a Metabolism Boy or Girl on your hands?

These can be tough moments in parenting.

As we think of the dead, wounded and homeless in Haiti, search for ways to help and give thanks for our own good fortunes, many of us who are parents of young children will face the additional challenge of questions about Tuesday’s devastating earthquake.

This challenge can arise whenever there is a natural or manmade disaster.  Even if you try to keep your kids from watching the TV or listening to the radio, even if you bury the newspaper at the bottom of the recycling bin, kids may hear about disasters at school, friends’ houses or any one of the numerous places a kid goes in the course of his week.  This is the world in which they are growing up, and sooner or later, they’re going to learn about it.

Kids react to these things differently.  One four-year-old little boy may see a few glimpses of the news before it is switched off and wake up in the middle of the night with nightmares about a building crashing down on top of him.  A nine-year-old girl may wonder what it would be like to be a nine-year-old girl in the affected area.  Little kids may focus on the immediate and the personal: Can this happen here, to me?  Older children may form more complex reactions and want to know about the causes of earthquakes, how many people died and do we know anyone with friends or family in Haiti?

Parents’ reactions need to be tailored not just to their own preferences regarding how much news their kids should be exposed to, but to their children’s ages and personalities, too.  At the bottom of this post,  I’ve listed just a few of the many resources available online where you can look for information about kids’ reactions to disasters and trauma and how you might talk to your kids about the earthquake in Haiti.  If your child’s behavior changes and it seems serious, you can always contact a counselor or your pediatrician.

I’ve learned in my house that my two kids need different approaches to events like this.  “Jack” first approached me with tough questions about life when he was four years old: What happened on 9/11?  How did the bad men kill those people?  How exactly does a baby get made?  What is the nature of infinity?  (I’m paraphrasing that last one, but he did force me to pursue that concept for about six months.)

With Jack, I take an honest, one-or-two-drops-at-a-time approach to disasters.  Now that he’s eight, I allow him to watch small portions of news coverage on these stories in my or his father’s presence.  He’s been able to read for years, so it makes more sense to me to guide him through some of the darker aspects of life in small pieces than to try to hide everything from him.  There are still topics I haven’t introduced because I don’t think he’s old enough, but when he comes to me with a question, I answer it honestly.

And that last bit is the key with Jack.  In my opinion, tough, rational questions from a child deserve honest answers.  He sometimes gets a dose of my values with those answers, sometimes he gets just facts, but I tell him the truth.  I usually limit what I tell him to the scope of his question, maybe a tiny bit more, then sit back and wait to see if there are follow ups.  If he wants to know more about something than I am equipped to give him, we explore the question together in a book or online.  And if I think he’s getting scared, I offer reassurances and we stop.  But Jack rarely gets scared.

Four-and-a-half year old “Emmie” requires an entirely different approach.  This is a child who can be frightened if the cat she’s known all her life walks too close to her, if the music of a ballet or cartoon hits deep octaves or even if Dora the Explorer is having a bad day.  I haven’t even brought her inside a movie theater yet because I think the vastness, blackness and loudness of the place would cause her to wet her pants.  Emmie also gets honest answers from me, but I tell her the bare minimum, try not to let her see anything scary on television and distract her as quickly as possible if she notices something.  Emmie’s sense of the divides between reality and fantasy, the possible and the impossible is much less developed than Jack’s was at the same age.  With Emmie, it’s all about avoidance.  She’s just not ready for the world yet.

And that’s perhaps the most important lesson to take away on helping our kids understand and cope with disasters like the earthquake in Haiti.  Utilize the resources below and many others, but don’t forget to know and watch your kid, because each child is different.  And don’t be afraid to ask for help if you see something in him or her you don’t understand.  After all, we adults often have a tough time understanding the world around us; it’s a no-brainer that sometimes we might need a little help making sense out of it for our kids.

A few resources that may be helpful (Please note that while some of these resources are intended primarily for children directly affected by disaster, some children may experience trauma by virtue of exposure to images, etc., and the behavioral descriptions and techniques described here may be useful in those types of cases, too.)

• Discussing the Haiti Disaster with Your Children (Momlogic)
• Mental Health America Fact Sheet: Helping Children Handle Disaster-related Anxiety
• Tips for Talking to Children After a Disaster (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services)
• Haiti Tragedy (Washington Post)

Also, if you are looking for ways to help those affected by the earthquake in Haiti, you can visit my post from yesterday and click on one of the many organizations listed who are accepting donations.

I’ve written about this topic before, but this is the new and improved (and rewritten) version.  Please check out my latest article, published today on Babble.com: “10 Things Not to Say to Adoptive Parents–especially in front of their kids.”  (And for you adoptive parents out there, there are also some thoughts for you to offer in reply when you do hear these things.  And you know that you do.)

Photo Credit: Montshire Museum of Science

I, the kids and their grandfather drove an hour north on Friday to see the dinosaurs at one of our favorite spots for a fun afternoon, the Montshire Museum of Science. As I mentioned last week, the children’s museum in Norwich, Vermont, is hosting two dino exhibits from October 1 to January 3: “Be the Dinosaur: Life in the Cretaceous” is an interactive, virtual-reality sort of experience where you can hunt for food and be on the lookout for predators yourself via digital technology; and “Giants: African Dinosaurs” explores the prehistoric population of the African continent through actual skeletons, fossils and life-size models.

(Note: “Be the Dinosaur” will head to Rochester, New York after closing at the Montshire January 3. Other possible locations for the exhibit include museums in Arkansas and Delaware, as well as eventual permanent installation in multiple venues. “Giants” will be heading back to its home in Chicago for storage for a while once it leaves the Montshire, but you can learn more about the exhibit at Project Exploration’s website.)

I was most impressed by the African Dinosaur exhibit, particularly by the 33-feet high, 70-feet long Jobaria skeleton that commanded my attention the second I walked through the museum’s doors. I kept turning around to stare up at the colossus as I moved around the museum, fearing perhaps that the thing would come to life when I least expected it a là Ben Stiller in A Night at the Museum. The items on exhibit are small in number but awe-inspiring in their presentation, and the information on plaques and displays should inspire any dino-fan to consider the differences between African dinosaurs and pterandons and their cousins on other continents. (Pterandons were NOT dinosaurs; if you don’t know or don’t believe this fact, just assert that they were dinosaurs to my junior paleontologist, seven-year-old “Jack,” and step back so as not to receive the full brunt of the verbal tongue-lashing you will receive.)

I not quite as blown away by the virtual dinosaur exhibit contained in one room at the museum. It was unquestionably cool to be able to sit down in front of an interactive computer where I could choose to be a T-Rex or a Triceratops and try to survive a cycle of prehistoric play in one piece. I felt a certain amount of intuitive anxiety as I wondered what dangers lay beyond my field of vision and if I would soon be attacked. But the controls were not intuitive and the instructions for operating the “simulator pods” were inadequate at best. So by the time I figured out what I was doing and how to search for food and water while keeping an eye out for predators, I had already lost some of my enthusiasm for the experience. It felt a bit like one more computer game at which I wasn’t particularly good.

Of course, more important than my or any adult’s view of this or any other museum’s child-oriented exhibit is what the children thought of it. My two kids loved it. Jack eagerly jumped into every available type of pod for his chances to “be the dinosaur” and reported that he really did feel like he’d spent some virtual time struggling to survive in the Cretaceous Era. Even four-year-old “Emmie,”—who only likes dinosaurs because as Jack’s little sister, she has no choice—was mesmerized by a computer-controlled, simulated jeep drive through Cretaceous territory.

When I asked Jack later to name his favorite part of the combined exhibits, he, too cited the gargantuan Jobaria skeleton. But he really reveled in the whole thing, so much so that I’m now arranging for his upcoming birthday party to revolve around a trip to the Montshire. (Hey, Jack’s friends’ parents, I hope you’re up for a drive.)

In sum, Dinosaur Days at the Montshire has something for everyone at all interested in dinosaurs. And adults, if you get tired of being the dinosaur, you possess an option that is not available to the kids: you can be the dinosaur’s mom or dad and just watch the fun on your hatchlings’ faces.

(Special note to the FTC, which is apparently so worried about the specific problem of bloggers’ commercial relationships that last week they issued a ground-breaking ruling on the topic that seems to have raised more questions than it answered: There is no commercial relationship between myself and the Montshire, except for the fact that I and my family are members. So we paid them. They did not pay me to write about the exhibits or the museum. Nobody gave me any money, dinosaur bones or other fossils or artifacts. Hmm, it makes me wonder if I’m doing something wrong.)