This morning, Christopher began telling me for maybe the hundredth time certain facts and statistics about monsters. He has always been interested in facts and statistics (i.e. the biggest, the tallest, the deepest, the greatest population, the fastest, etc.) and has some crazy ability to retain facts about everything from dinosaurs, ocean life, mammals, and now the solar system, which is his latest obsession. I mean, he can tell you off the top of his head the exact temperature of the core of the sun, the lowest temperature recorded on Pluto, Antarctica, how many earths can fit into Jupiter's red spot, what the diameters are of each planet, and he can rattle off the names of more than a dozen stars from our sun to Canis Majoris in order of size.
That said, he likes to apply these statistics to monsters that he has dreamed up in his wild imagination. The monster I've heard the most about is the Acoelyis monster, which is thousands of feet tall, runs thousands of miles per second, and eats millions of tons of food. The other day when he was telling me about his imaginary monsters, I suggested that he should write a book about all of his monsters. He replied, "Well how on earth could I do that?!" I told him all he had to do was write down the names of each monster and then describe them. This morning he was flipping through Dr. Seuss's My Book About Me that he got for his 5th birthday last year. This book is great because there are places where kids can fill in their own answers on the pages (i.e. hair & eye color, address, phone number, age, weight, favorite pet, what I want to be when I grow up, etc.). He had pretty much filled the entire thing out except for the last couple of pages, which were for the child's first story. He asked me this morning what story he should write, so I suggested that he write about monsters. To my utter shock and surprise, he sat at the kitchen table for the better part of an hour, intent and focused on filling out both pages with his monster story! I can hardly get this kid to stay focused long enough to write his full name let alone write a long story. He had so much fun writing this that he asked for more lined paper to start another story. What cracks me up is that he writes just like he talks. If you click on each image, it should enlarge enough to read it. I've provided a translation below since many of the words are misspelled. But hey, he's six!
"Once upon a time I was writing monster facts. This is what I wrote: from monsters we cannot see to huge monsters (bigger than that). But that's not all! There are infinite monsters! And what kind is the biggest? The Lone Great Wall Monster. Yes Sir! But the Cook Monster which is 15 feet long, it was seen with 100 legs! But the Pecan Monster is 4 nanometers. And it was first found in 1956. 4,001 Monster scientists discovered it! The story has much more to go! And this monster has a funny name! Don't guess! The SooKoo monster! Which was 187 feet tall. And do you know how long it is? 400 feet long!!!!! But the Shoof monster has a very long diet! Do you want to hear it? Well it eats 50 goldfish and clownfish a day! And with itself 9,028 feet tall and 15,256 feet long, this Monster can run 16 mile per hour! But here is some facts of the Lone Great Wall Monster: it is the most common monster known. It lives half of Russia. It eats 19 tons of ostrich a year!! Also 900 pounds of emu a day!!!!!! And the Crab Monster can hop 7,204,454 feet off the ground! It lays 202 eggs! But it is the slowest monster known to man! It walks 1,988 mile per day! It has 141,997 species and lives for up to 15,000,001 years old! It does!"
