mad for power, mad like a cow

I asked four year-old Lola today, "If you could be anyone in the world, who would you be?" I was expecting to hear about princesses, but the answer was, with no hesitation, "You! I would be you, Mommy, because I like you so much." (The child was born to shmooze).

Lola continued on: "And then you would be ME." She expressed some quiet happiness at the thought of being in charge of me.


Later, Lola got to exercise some authority when seven year-old Iris suddenly told her to throw their father out of the room. The Sober Husband was in mid-sentence when the order was issued, and Lola immediately assumed a bulldozer like stance and pushed her father out the door. Iris went back to thumbing through her new Simpsons comic without saying anything else. I was initially speechless, and then Iris explained. "She's my security guard! She's the security!" (The husband just went back to work on his computer without complaint).

Evidently I'm popular today, as no one invoked the security four year-old to push me around. I should be, as I bought them cute plush microbes with googly eyes. Lola picked a representation of the mad cow prion, Iris, after much hesitation, got a white blood cell (she came close to getting flesh eating fasciitis), and I got myself a plague bacteria and a giardia (as shown in the picture). Oh, how I love these educational toys. We saw them days ago and at that point I resisted getting any, but we couldn't get them out of our minds, and as the children had been good lately, I took them back to get bugs today. (From the educational tags, you can learn a lot about these microbes, including that they're available online at giantmicrobes.com]. Lola likes to pretend her mad cow prion is eating our brains, and Iris thinks her white blood cell makes a lovely security object.