Operation Fort and the Secret Agent

I never thought I'd be one to call 16 degrees balmy, but that's how this winter has gone. If the temp creeps anywhere near 20 degrees, we're simply fools if we don't get outside.

Add to that the odd luck of our lot placement. We're right along the boulevard for a good distance. After all of the snow, and then the freak rainstorm, several plows came in to clean up the snow. As a result we have a boulevard full of ice bricks just begging to be used as building materials. 

The fort itself was entertainment enough. Then Maya added her game. She became a secret service agent, defending Queen Elliot from the evil witches.

Would you believe this game was concocted with one part of a Martin Luther King Jr. history lesson at school, one part Pawlenty speech, and a head full of big ideas?

After a surprisingly candid school lesson, I spent an afternoon looking up MLK Jr. info with Maya online. We tried to emphasize who he was and what he accomplished, but she glommed onto the assassination bit in school and that is all she has fixated on. Who shoots someone just because they don't like his ideas?

It's a poignant question this week, certainly.

So when I was putting lunch together yesterday and Tim Pawlenty's speech to the National Press Club came on, I turned it up.... and Maya turned it off. "We need some quiet now," she told me. I tried to explain who Pawlenty was, that he wants to run against Obama in the next election, and that I wanted to hear what he had to say on his new-found national stage.

A look of panic crossed her face. "Is he going to shoot Obama?" she asked, as if all disagreements end this way. After assuring her that people disagree all the time without harming each other (and congratulating myself for keeping the radio off Monday and Tuesday when the news proved me wrong), I told her of the secret service. It became the story of a vast, highly trained network of protectors around our nations leader, whoever that may be at the time.

"Can girls be secret servents? Or just boys," she asked. Ouch.

"Of course girls can be secret service agents too."

Thus the game was born, and a new item was added to the what would you like to be list, along with astronomer, baker, and fire fighter. What a kid!