Four is the new cool.

I love babies. I love, love, love, LOVE babies. I loooooove them. They are the best. All snuggles and warm baby smells and just all around nice to hold, look at, kiss and love on.

BUT. Babies do not stay babies forever. Soon they start rolling, and walking and talking...and then, then they turn two.

But they do not stop there! Oh no! It gets worse! They turn three-going-on-thirteen with attitudes to put teenagers to shame!

 And then one day you wake up, and your chubby cherub, your precious pumpkin, is now four. He's a kid. A for real, talking back, making up his own rules, child. You can barely remember those sweet days rocking him to sleep or kissing his pudgy cheeks as he depends on you day after day for everything. And instead your memories are being replaced by day after day of argumentative come backs that are better thought out than you ever would have imagined from someone so small.

Some days I wish I could magically send us back to the beginning where it was just me and my tiny newborn, getting to know each other for the first time. No four-year-olds demanding things at the top of their lungs. Asking for things not politly, but by saying one word in a totally demeaning way. "MILK!...MILK!...MOOOMMY! I SAID MILK!!"

BUT. Four-year-olds are amazing. The imagination, the ideas, the intuitive-ness of them is overwhelming some days. They come up with interesting thoughts that are all their own and you are blown away by how all that knowledge you had been stuffing into their little brains for YEARS has finally been taken, rearranged, and spit out as totally their own conscious thought.

Monster has been amazing the boots off me recently.We had a day discovering Martin Luther King JR. and differences in people and how we are all the same in the end. And he came up with these ideas for how to make the world a better place:

-Everyone should put lids back on pens so they don't dry out
-Keara-dog should stop getting everything dirty, like the windows
-Everyone charge your phones, wash your windows, and eat and drink
-Talk about it instead of fighting
-Everyone should wash their hair
-Say nice words to people instead of mean ones

If you ever wondered what four-year-olds thought was important in life, there you go.

Bike bombs.

It all started at Christmas. Santa Clause and his idea of a "good" gift. Monster had asked for a train set (to, you know, go with his other five train sets), but Mr. C thought he might like a bike better.

Great. Perfect. We could all use some more exercise. New Years resolitions and all, you know.

So here we are, two sleep deprived parents, way past our bedtime, building this awesome bike. It does not even dawn on our tired, slow functioning minds what having a bike in the house on Christmas morning might involve. Obviously we could have put a stop to it right away, set rules from the beginning. "Take your bike outside to ride", but then there is no place outside to ride at our house. A sloped driveway leads to a sloped road, which ends on a flat, busy street. So that isn't happening.

This bikes sole purpose is for walks, fun times at the park, and camping trips. However, as soon as the kid saw the bright red bike, he did the obvious thing. He jumped on it and started to ride it! We laughed, thinking it was funny, and commenting how our ugly laminate floors can't get any worse, so what was the harm?

Fast forward to this week. Our friends lend us a bike for Monkey to use. It's raining. It's pouring. It's frickin' storming out there! We are stuck home, tired, bored and nothing to do. "Mommy, can you bring our bikes in to ride?" Why not! It sounded like an awesome idea to get some energy out!

Fast forward to today. Three days of riding out bikes in the house. (Gotta say, as ugly and tacky laminate flooring is, it is one tough surface). We alternate this with playing Lego Batman on the Xbox, and making blanket forts, and valentines crafts, and all that jazz.

And then the reason for this whole post happened. The incident that made me wonder if bikes should be allowed in the house. No. Not for safety reasons. No. Not because they broke something. But because of pure imagination. Pure brotherly "love". Pure innocent childhood fears.

Monster blew up Monkeys bike bombs. Yup. He popped them. All three of them.

It sent Monkey into a screaming, crying, crocodile tear sobs of sadness. His whole world was shattered.

Needless to say it was an interesting moment of decision for me. Since I had asked Monster to stop blowing up Monkey's bombs during the commotion, he had to take a minute and go sit in his room. Then we had a talk about how we don't do things that make other people sad.

And Monkey? How did I end my big blue eyed babies saddest moment of the day? I made some new imaginary bombs for him, of course.