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Destroy Spiders with Fire
May. 21st, 2005 05:29 pmTo fill a few moments, I was playing with my children with Duplo blocks (oversized Legos for those un-hip to preschool toys). Eric, who is eight, had grabbed all the regular-shaped bricks and was industriously building some sort of wheeled conveyance. It's unclear why he wanted to play with Duplos at all, since he has vast bins of proper Legos; I'm sure it had something to do with the fact that his sister was playing with dad, and therefore failing to play with dad as well would be ACCEPTING DEFEAT.
Katherine, almost four, had the balance of the blocks -- mostly the mutated castoffs with weird shapes or Winnie the Pooh on them or bizarro things the shape of sunflowers, generally anything deemed unacceptable for construction by 8-year-old boys. Katherine didn't care; she was jamming everything together she could get her hands on and having a grand time. Pretty soon she had a large blobby amalgamation, a vast platform with a mass of curious arms and minarets and brightly colored turrets. As is usually the case with Katherine, this construction became the focal point for some inventive imaginative play.
"Froom! skrznt! roolf!" shouted Katherine, pushing her creation across the floor. She had to stop every foot or so to pick up and reattach the bits that kept falling off.
"Whatcha doing, Katherine?" I asked.
"I'm killing spiders!" she announced joyously. "This is the skroofer! this is where the fire comes out and burns them all up! SHFOOF! SKRAR! yeeeee!" That last noise, plainly, was the keening cry of panic-stricken spiders as they fled from the skroofer.
"Huh. What's this?" I asked, pointing to a piece on the top. It was a green piece with a spiky top - a duplo block meant to represent grass from some pastoral construction set.
"Dad, that's grass," Katherine explained, annoyed at her parent's stupidity.
"Yeah, but what's it for?"
Katherine required approximately zero seconds to devise an explanation. "That's grass to make the spiders feel nice and safe! and then I get up to them, and I burn them! with fire!"
Eric viewed all this disdainfully. "I will make an alliance with the spiders," he proclaimed. "I will teach them to destroy your machine, and together we will RULE."
Katherine sat bolt upright and eyed her brother coldly. "Oh no you won't," she replied in a very quiet voice -- a voice, nevertheless, filled with menace. Eric looked up at her and, for a split second, I saw fear in his eyes.
I love my children, in large measure, precisely because they are MY children.
Katherine, almost four, had the balance of the blocks -- mostly the mutated castoffs with weird shapes or Winnie the Pooh on them or bizarro things the shape of sunflowers, generally anything deemed unacceptable for construction by 8-year-old boys. Katherine didn't care; she was jamming everything together she could get her hands on and having a grand time. Pretty soon she had a large blobby amalgamation, a vast platform with a mass of curious arms and minarets and brightly colored turrets. As is usually the case with Katherine, this construction became the focal point for some inventive imaginative play.
"Froom! skrznt! roolf!" shouted Katherine, pushing her creation across the floor. She had to stop every foot or so to pick up and reattach the bits that kept falling off.
"Whatcha doing, Katherine?" I asked.
"I'm killing spiders!" she announced joyously. "This is the skroofer! this is where the fire comes out and burns them all up! SHFOOF! SKRAR! yeeeee!" That last noise, plainly, was the keening cry of panic-stricken spiders as they fled from the skroofer.
"Huh. What's this?" I asked, pointing to a piece on the top. It was a green piece with a spiky top - a duplo block meant to represent grass from some pastoral construction set.
"Dad, that's grass," Katherine explained, annoyed at her parent's stupidity.
"Yeah, but what's it for?"
Katherine required approximately zero seconds to devise an explanation. "That's grass to make the spiders feel nice and safe! and then I get up to them, and I burn them! with fire!"
Eric viewed all this disdainfully. "I will make an alliance with the spiders," he proclaimed. "I will teach them to destroy your machine, and together we will RULE."
Katherine sat bolt upright and eyed her brother coldly. "Oh no you won't," she replied in a very quiet voice -- a voice, nevertheless, filled with menace. Eric looked up at her and, for a split second, I saw fear in his eyes.
I love my children, in large measure, precisely because they are MY children.
