19 February 2009

A Salt Rifle

Bubaloo is fascinated with all things war. Guns, army men, blowing things up, war strategy. It horrifies me.

We’ve spent some time talking through war with him and trying to discourage him from his future ambition of being an army man. We’ve tried the gruesome approach – you could have your arm or leg blown off. We’ve tried the morbid approach – you could die. We’ve also tried the tugging heart string approach – you wouldn’t be able to have cuddles and kisses whenever you wanted if you were to be deployed far away.

Nothing has worked. He is totally fixated.

To accompany his obsession with being an army man, he is enthralled with toy guns. We don’t allow him to have toy guns. We were somewhat reluctant to even get him a water gun this past summer for fear of encouraging this fascination.

But no matter what we do, he has this incredible boy-ability to turn any inanimate object into a gun.

A wooden spoon. A stick. A ladle. A broomstick handle. And most recently, the Swiffer.

We have a Swiffer that comes apart into four metal pieces. Using elastics, he managed to tie the pieces together so that there was a longer and shorter side that he was able to refashion into a gun. This time he called it a rifle. A sniper rifle to be exact.

An out of town friend stopped by for a visit, and Bubaloo was up and down the living room with his toy making it so that no one could focus on the conversation. I asked him to play somewhere else in the house and to take his assault rifle with him.

He grabbed the Swiffer gun and muttered as he went up the stairs, “It’s not an assault rifle. It’s a sniper rifle.”

Confused I shouted after him, “Bubaloo, what’s the difference between an assault rifle and a sniper rifle?”

Indigently he retorted as if I were the most uneducated and informed person on the planet, “a salt rifle shoots salt and a sniper rifle shoots bullets.”

A salt. Assault. Those homophonic words will get you every time!

2 comments:

Ottawa Gardener said...

As always, this is very fantastically written. Well at least we know that salt is the ammo of choice for long range rifle men...

I wonder if he'd be into robots, battling ones and then slowly nuding into building other things... just a thought.

It's princess land when you have little girls. We actually openly forbit the P stuff in our house to the horror of our friends. I say that I don't want her role models to be women who are powerful based on their appearance and birth right. So they play 'fairies' instead that also have to dress up in pretty dresses. Thankfully my hard work seems to be paying off (this is a long comment eh?) and the magic aspect of fairies is prevailing, with appearance falling by the wayside.

JaneV said...

I have a son who was the same way and I have to say forbidden fruit is so seductive. Why not let him learn and play guns in a safe environment like a paint ball arena? If he is going to be an army man because that is what he wants, you can't stop him. But at least let him be great at it which will help him survive if he ultimately chooses that route. More likely, he will get his oats out and move on to something else.