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!