family war

We avoided the issue of violence for almost three years, but Gran introduced Dennis to gun play a little while back with a plastic toy gun (Dennis calls it a 'pow'). And we let him get a pop gun (one of those deals with the rubber stopper that pops out and makes a pop sound when you push in the trigger/plunger/whatever) when we went to Santa's Village in Huntsville. So I suppose what happened tonight was inevitable. We've been cooped up with the cold weather with no relief in sight, and though we have enough indoor square footage to adequately exhaust an active running two-year-old, he was nearly climbing the walls. So when he grabbed his pop gun and aimed it at me and yelled "POW! I got you, Mommy", I grabbed up another pop gun (we ebay-ed a second one when it seemed that David had broken the first one, but then he fixed it and now we have two) and POWed him right back and then took off running. What followed was a hilarious half hour of us chasing and hiding behind doors and furniture and 'shooting' each other and running and laughing. Dennis would say "let's go pow Daddy" and we'd sneak in there and aim at him and fire. About the third time we did this, he was hiding from us and when we found him, he had a NERF gun that shot actual foam darts. Dennis LOVED this, so David went back to his stash of toys and located a NERF dart machine gun type thing. So the guys shot darts at me, helpless with my little pop gun, and we all laughed and enjoyed the game. It took a number of books to settle Dennis back down for bedtime, and he cried a little and said he wanted the "smush-mashing gun" which I took to mean the NERF machine gun. I look forward to a rematch after I hit the NERF aisle at Wal-Mart.
We only had to put him to bed once tonight! Thank you, Tyke Light!!!