Henry's Fossilized Marshmallow

By Grandma's request, I'm finally doing another Henry post. While his younger brother is making us laugh, Henry is confounding us on a regular basis. Every day he increases my understanding of how all those boys in elementary school already knew EVERYTHING about science, animals, volcanoes, dinosaurs, etc. before we ever learned about them in school. Boys like Henry CRAVE nonfiction books and can't wait to learn more and more about all that crazy stuff.

We recently got a great book from the library called One Million Things: Planet Earth. Henry would look at this for hours and hours at a time and run back and forth to wherever I was, reporting his latest find. "Mom, did you know that there are palm trees on the western coast of Scotland?"

During the six weeks we had this book from the library, Henry was also lucky enough to find this "fossilized marshmallow" in our backyard.

What a discovery! Who knew our backyard was such a treasure trove?

The next awesome book we found from the library was Animals: a Visual Encyclopedia. If you want to catch a glimpse of Henry's excitement about this book, watch this clip:

Henry Reads about Animals from Ben and Jenn on Vimeo.

This kid knows more than I do about . . . pretty much everything.

We had to renew this book after our six-week stint, because Henry wasn't ready to let go of it. It's too exciting! "Mom, did you know that only one kind of tortoise is endangered, but NONE of the turtles are endangered? BUT some of their numbers are declining . . ."

We brought this book with us on our Thanksgiving road trip, and Henry spent over 2 1/2 hours reading it. Literally. He started at 7:45 and finished the book around 10:30. And then he turned back to the beginning and started reading it again. This kid, I tell you, may not actually be my child. Okay, so when you look at his face, you can't deny that he's mine. But his brain must be directly from B.E.N.