Cousins in Arms

The children's three very-local cousins, who live a few towns away from us, are all within a few months of our children's births, and all seem to have the same constitutions, even though they're all girls, such that when they get together, they form natural pairs of like-minded souls, very much according to the birth-order cookbook: Ian and their oldest cousin are responsible and entitled, Daniel and the second cousin are The Opposition, and Madeleine and the third cousin are confident, mildly mischievous, playful. And of course they have rather similar interests, within their respective age-brackets.

So on Saturday, Ian and his oldest cousin in that family were the couple, playing house. (There has been some discussion of marriage between these cousins, since they apparently don't realize that this isn't 19th-century France...). And Daniel and the second cousin were pirates; as they were discussing their roles, I head Daniel telling her something like, "We're bad." So it was only a matter of time before the play-set in their backyard became the pirate ship. Daniel and Company were the pirates, holding captive an innocent, hapless civilian couple - regular people - played by Ian and his counterpart. I didn't bother telling them how much art is imitating life in all of this, in terms of recent events off the coast of the Horn of Africa... And best of all, the stuffed animals that each of them had acquired at the just-completed birthday party joined in as fellow captives on the pirate ship.

(April 10, 2011)