Mr. T has a (toy) gun

I almost didn't post this picture but I just had to. Sigh.

Let me start out by saying this: I had 2 natural births. My babies were both breast-fed almost exclusively. We eat about 90% organic food. The kids only watch public television because there are no commercials. They both had an abundant amount of wooden, european baby toys. They both can parrot the phrase "there's no such thing as girl toys or boy toys, you can play with whatever you want.". Miss E barely wore pink the first year of her life. And I made it exactly 6 years, 7 months and 7 days into parenting before one of them owned a gun toy.

Hello, my name is Sarah, I'm a crunchy granola-type mom and my son owns a gun toy (hangs head in shame).

Oh I knew this day would come at some point but I didn't quite picture it happening today and for some how I had pictured water guns before something like this. But this is what happened today.  A bright yellow gun with a hammer, a barrel and a trigger. And darts that shoot out.

I guess Mr. T had wanted one of these while I was in Spain and Peter told him to save up his money, earn some extra doing jobs around the house, and they would buy it. Well, today was the day that he woke up, wanted to count his money, figured out he had enough and he and Peter made a special trip to the store to get it. Despite all the heavy sighing coming from my direction, I don't actually care that much. I grew up never being allowed to have Barbies because my mom thought they sent the wrong message to girls (which I agree with) but the result of that was that I felt left out when all my friends were playing Barbies. It kind of became a statement about deprivation rather than femininity. I don't want my kids to feel that same sense of deprivation. So I knew, when Mr. T's friend had a nerf-shooter dart gun that they days were numbered until he asked for one and kuddos to Peter for throwing in a monetary lesson and making Mr. T buy it himself.

He has, of course, been instructed not to point it at people or the animals or the TV or computer. But he is so dang excited about it, that I just can't rain on his parade. However, he wants to clip it to his pants and take it every place and, well, let's just say that having him packing heat at the local organic grocery is a little bit humiliating for me but at this point in parenting I am mostly immune to the judging looks of others so we are strapping it on and going grocery shopping.