Every weekday morning, I…

Every weekday morning, I tell Anand an Angry Birds story on the two-block walk to his preschool. As you can imagine, even my fabulous powers of invention are challenged by the task of continuing to come up with Angry Birds stories that don't bore me in the telling. Today, I tried telling a Pig story instead (if you aren't familiar with this game, the pigs are the bad guys, who start the whole mess off by stealing the birds' eggies).

Anand listened to the whole thing, and I was feeling pretty pleased with myself for coming up with an interesting variation, a poignant tale of pig effort and suffering (the birdies knocked down their meticulously-built tower! but the other piggies told them, consolingly, that it would be okay, that they could build another one tomorrow).

But my smugness was not to last. At the end of the story, Anand was very upset, and insisted that he wanted a BIRD story, not a PIG story, and I couldn't leave him at school until I provided such. So I did, very quickly, and the moral of this story is, almost-four-year-olds are perhaps not ready to see the world in shades of grey. Birds are good, pigs are bad, and let's not ever get confused about who the real heroes are!