wolf stew

Two of the kids are in the kitchen playing with their stuffed animals.

"I caught the wolf for our dinner," one kid has one animal say.

"Rip its eyes out," says the other.

"Tear its nose off, too," says the first.

More gory pretend dismemberment follows.

And how does my sweet only daughter feel about all this?

I'm not entirely sure, but she's in there saying, "Now squeeze all the blood into the pot, and we'll make a sauce and cook it in its own blood."

I think she started the game.

It's not that we don't have princesses and puppies around her. It's just that the princesses conquer their own enemies, and the puppies act like wild animals--and she knows exactly how wild animals act because she delights in studying them in detail (she wants to be a wildlife biologist, and a farmer so she can study and raise animals). When I act shocked at her sometimes gory animals-acting-like-animals games, she reassures me that the good guys aren't being eaten or blown up or crashed in a plane-train-truck collision--only the bad guys. Most of the bad guys are big fluffy teddy bears for some reason (pellet-filled bears like beanie babies are exempt). Most of the good guys are cats. (And, for some mysterious reason, the really powerful good guys--the superhero animals--are all "best silly swimming." I'm not sure where the phrase came from, but when something is best silly swimming, it means it has magic powers.)

I guess the wolf is cooking now because it's sitting in a pot on a kitchen chair and the kids have moved on to more benign games with the 'good guys'--the stuffed puppy is now chasing a ball, and the stuffed dogs are playing with toy food to cut carrots and bake bread, complete with cinnamon, black pepper, and squeezed strawberries.

I guess she's a domestic cheetah princess mommy at heart.