Different?

Sweet Daughter wanted a handgun for her 4th birthday. While a-typical for most 4-year-olds, that’s old news around this house. But from time to time I’m reminded I’m a little … different.

First, there was the t-shirt incident. I was wearing my stamp act t-shirt.

I asked Sweet Daughter if the picture bothered her. She said it did, a little bit.

“But why? It’s just a picture of the skull Daddy uses at events.”

“Really?”

“Yup.” And she was fine.

Part of the Detached Hospital's Dental Display

Then there’s Sweet Daughter’s first grown-up party at the Gunnie Prom in Charlotte last Saturday. She was told what to expect, and what was expected of her, and I brought a kid-friendly-yet-appropriate activity for her so she wouldn’t find um, annoying ways to entertain herself. (Well, other than when she decided she needed to deliver something to Breda at the end of the row of tables, and decided the quickest way to accomplish this was to run the gauntlet under the row of tables. It was like she dissapeared into thin air. Good problem solving skills at least.) And when we got to the restaurant and she started holding her hands over her ears because it was too loud, I managed to find some earplugs in my purse for her. All moms carry those, right?

Special thanks to Breda for assistance with the artwork!

But yesterday morning she woke up and told me she’d had the worst bad dream of her life. Worse that the big, bad wolf, even. She said that she’d gone to the “NRA Gun Convention” (we’ll work on the redundancy issue when she’s older) and she’d taken her own purple pellet pistol to the indoor range because they’d asked to see it, but then they wouldn’t give it back. “They said it was too cute and they wanted to keep it. They played a trick on us!” she said. “It was really those ketchup people that want to take our guns away!”

I guess she remembered our conversation in the grocery store earlier in the week when I explained that we didn’t buy a certain ketchup because the family that owned the company didn’t want us to have guns.

I’m starting to think I’m not like other moms.