Monster Hands and I are out for a walk in the neighborhood. We just passed two little boys, aged 4 or so, playing in a yard.
Boy #1: “Baby!”
Me: “Hi!”
Boy #1: “Is that a real baby?”
Me: “Yep! She’s just wearing a big hat. See?”
At this, I tilted Monster Hands’s sun hat so it fell over her eyes and then perched back on her head.
Boy #1 laughed. Boy #2, made a face that suggested he was wresting with an existential crisis, aimed his empty squirt gun at us, and slowly pulled the trigger.
A few minutes later, we sat down under a tree. Here she is, possibly contemplating our earlier brush with gun violence.
