A Pig, A Gorilla, and A Gecko

One of my favorite bedtime activities is snuggling down with my son and making up a story together. We each take turns, weaving our ideas together. Sometimes we follow the same rabbit trail, but sometimes our stories end up in an unrecognizable place. I thought I'd share tonight's story with you (abridged; K - kid's storyline, M - mom's storyline).

K: There was once was a woman with a magical garden maze. It was very, very small. The plants in the maze started to rot and die. The woman hired planter guys to come in and replant the maze, but none of their plants would grow.

M: One night, the woman looked out of her bedroom window and noticed that only one tiny plant in the middle of the maze was still alive. She was so sad she began to cry. She went out to her maze and looked up in the sky. She wished upon a star, and her tears fell onto the plant.

K: The woman cried and cried and cried for days. Her tears touched the plant again, and it started to grow. The whole maze regrew. And the woman put a screen on the top of the maze to keep it safe. People started coming to look at the garden maze again. One day three people from the USA came on an airplane to visit the maze.

M: They asked the woman if they could walk into the maze. The woman agreed and took the screen off the top. As soon as the three people stepped into the maze, they shrunk down until the walls of the garden maze were ten times as tall as they were. They realized that they would have to search to find their way out. They began running through the maze, and found several dead ends. After turning back and continuing to search, they finally found their way to the end of the maze.

K: They stepped out of the maze and then they were 10 feet tall, and the maze and the woman were very small. They thought if they went back into the maze, maybe they would turn to normal size, but when they tried it, they shrunk tiny again. They kept trying and changing from tiny to giant. Finally they decided they had to get away from the maze. They walked and walked and walked, and as they walked, they began changing. When they got back to their airplane, they had turned into a pig, a gorilla, and a gecko. Now they had to figure out how to turn back into people.

M: And that will be volume 2 of our story.

Goodnight!!

Thou Hast the Right to Blow Stuff Up

Short blog post for today...
As I look back on our weekend activities, I am left pondering what blowing stuff up has to do with freedom? Is it a reminder to us of the battles that were fought (you know, cannon fire and all that)?
Do the colors of the burst symbolize anything? When did it start to be synonymous with our Fourth of July celebration?

These are largely rhetorical questions. I've decided after the weekend that there must be something hard-wired in the male genetics that leans toward pyromania. That coupled with the fact that by the time you get home from the local Freedom Festivities, it is damn near midnight and you are so exhausted that any bit of inhibition was long ago lost.

I can guarantee you, if my husband came across me giving our son a close-up and personal lesson on flambe, he'd be irate. And yet, when I come out of grandma's house and see my son leaning over a bottle rocket as it's being lit, I have to pause and ask myself, what part of that is a good idea?

We all survived our weekend...all fingers intact, no burns. And my son has a happy memory of his Fourth of July. Best of all...at least what I keep reminding myself...as long as he was giddy about blowing stuff up, he didn't whine and beg to play his cousin's Wii.