Building

I feel strongly about a lot of things. Some of these thoughts have remained consistent while others I have had to modify. As I get older and hopefully wiser, I see that some of my strong feelings may not be in harmony with my children and their strong opinions. One big area is guns. 

I never wanted to have toys which resembled guns in our home. I believed that if we didn't have them and promoted kindness to one another, my children would not seek them. I was completely wrong on this count! My children would pick up sticks, dinosaurs, fingers, pretty much anything to use as a gun. My oldest would make shooting noises while holding one of these "weapons." I still didn't want guns in our home. 

Gradually small guns started to enter our home. Well, truly they were light sabers or pistols in LEGO sets. There were also guns in the Playmobil sets. First I would remove them. Then I decided to just go with it. The gun love did not skyrocket. My children were still the same. In fact some of the fascination ended. I still balked at life size toy guns.

Recently I saw a photo on Pinterest that led me here.  I thought my kiddos would love them and the pacifist in me could handle shooting marshmallows by blowing through PVC. So we set out to our local hardware store to buy some PVC and connectors. The kiddos and I sketched out the plan. 

We gathered two elbows, one "t" and an end cap in addition to our PVC. We decided to cut our PVC as follows: 1 - 5", 2 - 4", 1 - 3" and 1 - 2.5". This seemed to make a marshmallow shooter which could be used by each of the children.

Working together in the driveway we cut and assembled four shooters.  One would be a gift for a friend's upcoming birthday. Bags of marshmallows were distributed and each of my children set off to shoot marshmallows. They created targets and taped them to the front door. They tried to shoot over small LEGO and Playmobil people. Quickly with the help of a friend, they discovered that if you lick the marshmallow it will stick to your target. Fortunately only one got stuck on the ceiling. They had tremendous fun with their "guns" and I think I may just be okay with it.