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By SARAH SMILEY
Boys Will Be Boys
I’ve noticed an interesting book out, The Dangerous Book for Boys (Harper Collins) by brothersThis used to come naturally to them. But the book contains lessons on fishing, building forts and go-karts, and identifying spiders and insects. The great success of The Dangerous Book for Boys suggests that many young boys don’t already know how to turn sticks into pretend guns or chase little girls with lizards and grasshoppers.
I have three boys. Not one of them needs this book.
Just the other day, I was clipping dead blooms off the rose bush when Ford came around the corner with a wooden musket hanging from his shoulder by a leather strap. He was wearing the triangle-shaped felt hat (the one he calls the “George Washington hat”) that we bought in
“You’ve gotta move, Mom,” Ford said. “The British are coming and we’ve got a war to fight.”
Just then, our neighbor’s boy peeked around the bushes looking suspiciously British.
“Right here in the front yard?” I asked. “Can’t you have a war in the backyard?”
Apparently they could not. You see, the Potomac River, that thin strip of white concrete that connects our driveway to the our front door, is indisputably in the front yard, not the back, and it can’t be moved.
Also, our front yard, once the burial place for the body parts of several plastic flamingoes left on our grass for a fundraiser and promptly destroyed by my son (because “flamingoes aren’t supposed to stand on two legs anyway,”), is the boys’ preferred place to play. I guess that’s mostly because – in fact, I’m sure of it – their dad and I paid the equivalent of several felt hats from
The boys’ front-yard fondness also might stem from their enjoyment of making a display of themselves in front of all our neighbors by playing tee-ball barefooted, hanging from the mailbox, pulling each other through the grass with a jump rope (not recommended), and sometimes, urinating in the dirt.
Before I escaped to the backyard to make way for the Revolutionary War, I wanted to finish pruning the roses and taking some limbs off the river birch because, of course, I want our front yard to look nice when the boys are beating each other on the ground.
As quick as I placed cut limbs on the grass, the boys were hauling them off to their “fort” and pretending they were swords. But my middle son, five-year-old Owen, who thinks jokes involving his bodily functions are the ultimate in humor, doesn’t understand the Revolutionary War the same way seven-year-old Ford does.
“I’m going to go get a gun from the garage,” Owen told Ford.
I looked around for passersby, ready to assure them that my boys weren’t talking about real guns – just another one of those tricky parts of parenting in today’s world.
“They’re not guns,” Ford yelled at Owen. “They’re muskets!”
Owen came back with a battery-operated laser gun that has a siren.
Ford threw his felt hat at the ground and stomped his foot. “Oweeeeen!” he yelled. “They didn’t have laser guns back then! And their guns didn’t have sirens! We’re talking about, like, 100 years ago!”
I looked up from my pruning. “Actually, it was more than 200 years ago, Ford,” I said.
Owen went back to the garage and came out with a football helmet on his head.
“What are you doing now?” Ford asked.
“I’ll be the helicopter pilot,” Owen said. “I’ll shoot down the bad guys.”
"They didn’t have helicopters either!” Ford was screaming now. “Come on, grab a musket and let’s fight the South.”
“The British,” I corrected. “The North fought the South in the Civil War.”
“Whatever.”
Owen pointed his laser gun at me and asked if I was British.
I finished my yard work while the boys slid on their bellies through the “swamps” of the battlefield and chased down runaway Big Wheels… er, I mean, horses. They continued to fight, alternately, the South and the British, and eventually, Ford gave up and let Owen use his laser gun with siren.
No, my boys don’t need a book to learn about being dangerous. But that day when the Revolutionary War, Civil War and Gulf War all were fought simultaneously on our freshly mowed lawn, I realized that my boys do need a history book.
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Sarah Smiley is the wife of a Navy pilot and daughter of a retired Navy pilot. She is the author of “Going Overboard: The Misadventures of a Military Wife” (Penguin/NAL), and her syndicated column “Shore Duty” appears weekly in military and civilian newspapers across the country. Read more about Sarah at her website, www.sarahsmiley.com.