How Wonderfully You're Growing; or, What We Do For Love

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Little Guy has been most enamored of the Discovery Channel program, Man vs. Wild. Some things stand out for him (and consequently us) more than others, such as the time the host Bear Grylls ate a rather large spider after plucking it from its web in the recent Autralian Outback episode: LG, the image of this fixed in his mind, resolutely refused to eat the following day, ostensibly because of the "gross factor;" though he did allow that should I manage to obtain some bacon for him, he was fairly certain that he could eat that.
We now have a platform in 0ur apple tree thanks to the Everglades episode. It was from this platform that LG announced to me as I hung wash on the line that he had prepared a stick, and with this stick, he intended to hunt a squirrel or a rabbit by hurling the stick at the quarry's head, much as Mr. Grylls did to a rabbit in the Wile E. Coyote episode. (Sorry, no one remembers where that happened: only that it did happen.)

Before you ask me the obvious---yes, I am. But LG has to develop his own sense of ahimsa in order to completely own it; and I have to allow him the freedom to do so. It is a difficult kind of love, but it is mine as these children grow. You know how it is.

Back to the conversation as it unfolds:
Hopefully, a squirrel.
Hmm. Then what happens when you have hit the squirrel with the stick?
Then Dad and Big Guy and maybe I will eat it.
Okay. So you are just going to pick it up, and start eating?
No. BG or Dad will use a knife and cut its skin off, and then cook it and then eat it.
Oh. Okay.

I go into the house to break the news to Snowy and BG: LG is out on the platform. He has a stick, and he wants to hunt a squirrel with it, just like Bear Grylls.
Snowy and BG chuckle.
He expects one of you all to skin it and cook it.
Immediately BG says, If LG gets a squirrel, then I'm eating it.