A Sinking Ship

I don't remember when I first mentioned the Titanic to the boys.

I think we were actually reading a book about dinosaurs. I dont know much about dinosaurs. I know even less about them now than I did as a child because the Dinosaur People decided things were getting boring, and then they made a bunch of new discoveries and changed everything that I knew to things I didn't know.

We came to TINANOSAURUS (tye-TAN-uh-SAWR-us) and, because we were listening to Percy Jackson at the time, I mentioned the word TITAN, and how TITAN came to be a word that meant very very big, like the dinosaur, and like the TITANIC.

Of course, because I used to have something of a crush on the Titanic (the boat, not the movie) I probably added a few details, like it was the largest boat ever, and that it hit an iceberg, and that it sank to the bottom of the ocean.

And then, at the library, I found a children't book on the Titanic that I thought would be just about Nick's reading level. He seemed interested, so I brought it home for the boys to look at and read. They were, for the most part, uninterested.

Except Andrew. Andrew ate this book up. He stared at every single page and made me read him the whole book. The next week at the library, he found another Titanic book, still for kids, but for slightly more advanced readers. Unlike the other one, it spoke about how people died, and there is actually a lovely drawing of a lifeboat floating among men in lifejackets. One of the men is raising his arm for help. The others are frozen in the water.

But Andrew clung to this book like nobody's business. He told the children's librarian about the Titanic. "It was a big boat. But it sinked. It hit a big ice cube, and it made a hole." He even took the book to Nate's Karate class and showed Nate's Kyoshi. "This is the boat! And this is the lifeboat. And these people are died."

Now before people get all over me for pushing a disaster like the Titanic on a 3-year-old, let me tell you that he also chose a book on The Hunley. He chose this - I hardly know anything about The Hunley. And when I finally showed him the Ballard book I have, the big one, with the photos, he was more interested in the diving machines that went down to sort through and recover the wreckage.

He isn't lingering on the morbid part of it. So even though it seems odd that he's loving this shipwreck, I'm not going to do anything to discourage him.

Besides, in a few weeks we're going to see the Pompeii exhibit. Now THAT's morbid.