Peanut: Can we have beets for dinner?
Me: Sure.
P: Raw, please. Or cooked.
M: Which one?
P: Raw. Shredded.
M: Okay.
P: With goat cheese, please. And balsamic. Or I’ll shoot you.

I’m quite over the shooting phase. It has been 10 days, and the boy can make anything into “a shooter.”

He doesn’t know a thing about guns. He only recently learned about bows and arrows. We’ve not shown him any movies with any projectile-firing weapons, and we don’t have any toys that fire projectiles. I was raised with guns, know my way around a gun, and have a terrified-respect relationship with guns. I want to live in a world with no guns. [Shut up with your “it’s too late for that, you commie liberal.” I know that, you jackass. And I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to the parents who read this blog because their kids drive them nuts, too. Go pay the NRA to lobby for your Constitution-misreading right and leave my blog alone.]

And yet he’s up every morning at 6, demanding tape so he can attach something to something else and pretend it shoots. Mostly his contraptions shoot me, because I’m the one lucky enough to be locked in a house with him far too many hours a day.

I asked the teachers, who said the same thing all the books do…pretend violence is not real violence. It’s natural and acceptable play. As long as you don’t give him something that fires projectiles, and as long as you don’t make a big deal about it, all will be fine.

So when he points at me, I say, casually, “please don’t point at me because I don’t like it.” And then I move on to something else, distracting either him or myself so we can not focus on the damned shooter.

Nope. 20 hours a day that kid is pointing something at me and bellowing, “soot soot soot!” [We have issues with the /sh/ sound.]

I’d be fine with a finger as a shooter. I’ll play pretend whip cream fight or pretend water hose like any other goofy mom. Heck, I’ll play pretend poop squirter if the mood strikes. But please don’t point construction paper-taped-pencils at me and say you’re going to make me dead. I know you don’t know what dead is. I know you don’t understand why pointing at anything you don’t want to kill is absolutely not okay. I know you need a fantasy life.

Can you please get it somewhere else?

Because you’re the one who wants shredded raw beets with goat cheese and balsamic. And if the other shooters heard you, they’d shoot you just for saying that.