A young boy’s love for dinosaurs has become an inspiration and a beacon of hope for Dunwoody residents.
The Torres family – Cesar, Lisa and their young children Coby and Rex – have become known for their holiday-inspired dinosaur inflatables in front of their Dunwoody Club Drive home, a project that evolved during the pandemic.
“In 2020, during these troubled times, we took my son’s curiosity and fascination with dinosaurs and turned it into a family project,” Lisa said. “At the time, I was going through some post-partum issues [after the birth of Rex] and the confidence and safety that Coby felt when he talked about dinosaurs was something I couldn’t give him.”
Seeing the smiles that the world of dinosaurs brought to her children inspired Lisa and Cesar to try to extend that feeling to people in the neighborhood, many of whom were going through the same isolation that the Torres’ family was experiencing.
The first dinosaur installation was put up around Halloween of 2020, with a lot of positive feedback, Lisa said, so the family ordered some Christmas-themed dinosaurs, then then moved onto Valentine’s Day, Easter, and on and on.
Lisa said she then started adding encouraging messages to the display with large cutout letters. For Valentine’s Day, she installed “Smile” to the mix, and people started commenting that they looked forward to the new displays at the newly minted “Dunwoody Dino House.”
“Whatever I was feeling at the time was what the signs said,” she said. “During April, which was Mental Health Awareness Month, we had a sign that said, ‘Your life matters,’ and we got a lot of great feedback from people.”
Lisa said her husband, who was working at home at the time, would see school buses stop in front of the house to check out the latest installation.
“It was so great to see the kids go nuts on the bus,” she said. “And Cesar would take pictures of parents and grandparents walking their kids by the house and stopping to see what we had up.”