Ruhtreat!

So, a little while ago, Gabe decided that he wanted to play with his armies. He's going through a bit of a needy phase right now. He is loath to do ANYTHING by himself for some reason. Every activity, every game, every sessions of star wars or legos or drawing or painting or swimming or everything he wants someone to do it with him. Well, not "someone." Pretty much me until Libby gets home. Norah is not an option.

And I understand why, too. Norah isn't much fun for him to play with. The other condition of playing with Gabe is that I have to do everything that he wants me to do it. He makes the rules and I have to do everything the way he wants. So, when we play, let's say Star Wars, we'll stand guys up and then he will tell me which guys get shot, by whom, and what happens to them. And then I am supposed to enact it. He's more or less becoming the director of play activities in our house, calling all the shots so that his vision of how things should work out comes to fruition.

But Norah isn't much for doing what she's told. She does pretty much whatever she wants. And usually she wants to play with whatever Gabe is playing with and do what he's doing with it--unless, an this is the important distinction, Gabe WANTS her to do what he's doing with it. Then she does something else, usually something mean like throw the toy away or hit Gabe with it.

This morning, Gabe wanted to play armies. I knew what this meant. He wanted me to sit next to him and stand up thirty or so little army guys. Then we would grab one at random and knock that one against all of the other ones, knocking them all down in about two seconds. And then the game would be over. But as soon as he told me to sit down next to him and play armies, Norah rushed in and demanded that she sit in the chair he'd chosen for me and play with the armies.

"Super," I said. "You can play with Norah!" But he wasn't excited by the prospects at all. Eventually, I negotiated a truce wherein Norah was allowed to play with Gabe's stuff, but Gabe got to make the rules and Norah had to follow them. I had little hope that this was going to work out since Norah alone makes the rules for Norah right now. But it got the kids playing together, so whatever.

And they got along pretty well. They had to compromise and each of them got to make the rules in turns, and Norah never actually followed a single one of Gabe's rules, but he was mostly able to ignore that fact and they played for almost an hour at the table.

At one point, they both started doing this:

I'm not entirely sure how the word was introduced into their vocabularies, and I'm even more uncertain how they were confusing it with it's exact opposite: "attack!" But there you go.