Gone With the Wind?

My poor little plants. I had so much enjoyed seeing that little bit of green life come to be on my balcony. The other day when I went to see how they were doing, I saw this:

There were twelve pots the night before... and more mysteriously, the eight other pots were nowhere to be seen in the parking lot or adjacent lawns. It had rained the night before, and the only logical conclusion I could come to was that the wind must have blown them off the balcony before it rained, and someone cleaned up the parking lot early the next morning. I'm mystified. There's no point replanting them now as I'll be gone in a few weeks :(

Over the long weekend, I had the good fortune of going to Ottawa to visit family and friends. As an added bonus, mom was there too! I thought I'd recount a funny story concerning my almost three-year old cousin. He's quite the talker, and very into imaginative play right now. We were playing a game which involved going to different stores of his choice in the "double stroller" (the couch). He asked if we could go to Chapters to read stories. I said sure, so off we went in our imaginations.

I started to tell him a made-up story about dinosaurs in the park. It had the typical brontosaurus, stegosauraus, T-rex, trieceratops, etc. After the third dinosaur story, he said: "Jess, can you tell me the one about the nineracops?"

I said, "do you mean triceratops?"

"No, nineracops"

"Ok, well, what kind of dinosaur is the nineracops?"

"One that goes really fast under the water." So, I made up a story about the fast swimming nineracops. After that, he asked me to tell him the story about the cliceratops. When I asked him what kind of a dinosaur that was, he said "It goes really really really fast under the water."

If there was one thing I learned while working at a science center, it was not to question the dinosaur knowledge of young boys, because when in doubt I would always be wrong. A bit of google-ing later revealed that there was no such thing as the nineracops or cliceratops (which I had suspected), but it made me quite happy to think about what must have been going on in his little imaginary world to create such things.