It's true. You can make a gun our of anything.

One of the things I wanted to do on all this time off was to spend time with my children. Alone, preferably, especially with The Boy, with whom I never get to spend time alone. So we did that today. Got up, got The Girl ready, dropped her off, and came home.

We played games -- Uno, Clue, Chutes and Ladders. We wrestled. We went out to lunch. We played at lunchtime with the crayons provided. (He's five. We go to restaurants that provide crayons.) We came home, we made paper snowflakes and then watched a Christmas show together. During the day I also cleaned the kitchen and made dinner, did a load of laundry and registered both kids for gymnastics in January.

I felt like super mom.

We came home later in the afternoon, with The Girl, and I sat on the floor with her and played with her shape sorter (something that has justclicked for her, like that, and she is now all over it.) And The Boy came by making flying / shooting sounds. With the snowflake. Folded.

"It's a MONSTER, mom!" he enthused. "And when you damage it, it goes like THIS." He unfolds it to its biggest, making accompanying ferocious noises.

I read the apocryphal tale about the parents who wouldn't let their little boy have gun toys, and he bit his toast into a gun and pretended to shoot them. And now, you know, I figure that kid's a rank amateur. Toast is toast. It's a blank slate. My kid took a snowflake, a symbol of peaceful winter tranquility, and made it into war. That takes talent.


Or so I will keep telling myself, so as not to think too hard about this.