Dinosaurs! And werewolves. And some more dinosaurs.

Gabriel has a vivid imagination. Really vivid. Maybe it's because he has three older brothers who pull his leg all the time, or because he's already been in a couple of Noah's plays (bit parts, mind you, but enough for him to talk about them incessantly). Maybe it's because he reads a lot or simply because we don't discourage it. He is six, after all. How long do kids get to believe in whatever makes them happy?

Last year, he got into some fairly heated debates with some very down-to-earth girls in his Kindergarten class. He insisted that dinosaurs were real and that he had, in fact, hatched dinosaur eggs in our backyard. I tried a gentle scientific approach, explaining that we had found dinosaur fossils, so we knew that they were real, but hadn't lived on Earth for a long time.

He wasn't having any of it. Every slightly rounded rock that he found was a potential dinosaur egg. Of course it didn't help that Colby kept stealing the "eggs" and telling him that they must have hatched.

This year, Gabriel played a werewolf cub who bit Noah (the leading man, I might add) in our high school's production of The Werewolf's Curse. It wasn't long after that he woke up with a sore arm. I told him that he had probably just slept wrong, but Colby (what is it with Colby?) told him that he was a werewolf and had bitten his arm the night before.

Guess what Gabriel told his class during their next "sharing" (a modern and somewhat dissatisfying take on show-and-tell without the show-and)? He let them know that during the next full moon he would be transforming into a werewolf. According to his teacher, he was deadpan serious. Needless to say, she moved to the next sharing quickly (although she was remarkably cool about informing us and even gave us suggestions on how to keep him from being upset when he didn't transform).

For two weeks, we heard about nothing besides werewolves. He Googled werewolves. He watched the calendar for the next full moon. He considered who he might bite when he did transform (some bullying second-graders were tops on his list). When the day of the full moon came, we were scrambling to give him an out.

Some serious Googling turned up a blog post about how some werewolves don't actually transform, but instead just feel differently during the full moon. Another post suggested that it could take years to fully transform. Although it was a bit disturbing that adult bloggers were giving as much thought to werewolves as my 6-year old, we ran with it.

Colby actually wrote a post himself suggesting that if a werewolf didn't eat a pile of vegetables that he wouldn't transform. Since Gabriel hates vegetables, this seemed like a fine approach.

By the time the moon rose that night, Gabriel was pretty well convinced that if he did transform at all, it would probably just be into a cub or something vaguely furry and grumpy. Dodged that silver bullet, so to speak.

More recently, he carried on quite a conversation with his tooth fairy. We stick with the story that there are many tooth fairies, explaining why some of his friends might get more per tooth than he does. A rash of lost teeth led to several visits and Noah couldn't help but leave him a note from his tooth fairy. Gabriel wrote back (of course) and ended up corresponding via under-pillow mail for several nights. Finally, the tooth fairy wrote that he was headed to Jamaica for a vacation, so he wouldn't be able to stay in touch for a while.

Now, however, we're back to dinosaurs. For him, these beasts still roam the Earth (somewhere). He found more round rocks yesterday on a walk and brought them home to hatch them. They sat on a pillow, covered with a small blanket until Noah snagged them and hid them before we went out for the evening.

When we came home, we had to do a complete check of the house to ensure that the hatched dinosaurs had escaped and weren't waiting for us. Since they obviously escaped, Gabriel asked me to call Animal Control and alert them. He's quite persuasive, so I ended up having a 3 minute Bob Newhart-style one-sided conversation with "Animal Control" on my Blackberry.

The kid was nervous, but he's a glutton for punishment. He made me read a chapter of Jurassic Park for our bedtime story.

When it comes down to it, though, we all value his brilliant imagination so much, we just can't bear to sit him down and have the talk yet. He'll figure it out. For now, he certainly gives us stories to tell and the wonder in his eyes makes any extra work well worth the effort.