a boy, his gun, and a monkey

I took the last few days to visit my dear cousin and her family in Massachusetts. I had an absolutely wonderful time. Good food, good drink, good laughs. We celebrated an early St. Patrick's Day with homemade decorations, Guinness beef stew, Irish soda bread, and green martinis.

I was ready to come home, mostly because I was getting the shakes from being away from work for so long. And I'm not all that used to hanging out with 5- and 2-year-old boys for that much time. The innate squirreliness of the boys was made more difficult by the fact that because of the deluge of rain being experienced by New England, we were confined to the house the entire time.

At one point, C decided he wanted to try out my camera. It's not a great camera, and I've dropped it a few times myself. He's a pretty careful kid, so I let him play with it. He was particularly proud of his newest toy, a nerf gun.

Let me be clear, his parents are about as far from being "gun people" as you can get. When C announced he wanted to be a soldier when he grows up, dad said, "we think you can solve problems by talking, so I think you can find something to do that helps solve problems that way instead of with guns." But there seems to be something about boys and guns, and he used his own allowance money to buy it after seeing it at his best friend's house.

The resulting pictures from his play were fantastic. I just loved them, and they so captured him at this moment. Here are a couple. The monkey in the photo is Ha - his security blanket stuffed animal.




And I love this one, just because.



I still have so much to learn about boys. Even the littlest ones.