Skelezombiewingymonster Boy

So I'm on my way home from work last night, with boys in the back seat. Secondborn is quickly falling asleep (because it's warm, and he skipped his afternoon nap). Firstborn, on the other hand, is playing with the skelezombiewingymonster that he liberated from the cabinet above my desk.

The skelezombiewingymonster was originally just a zombie action figure. However, he belongs to a line of figures that are designed to have interchangeable parts, so you can swap the arms, heads, wings, and other body parts. One of the other figures in the series was a “ghoul” – basically a skeleton, but with wings. Well, the ghoul must have been cast from a bad run of plastic, because he broke almost immediately. The only parts that remained functional were his left arm, his skull, and his wings. So I put the wings on the zombie, and swapped the zombie-arm for the skeleton arm. Firstborn (who had played with the zombie before) was understandably charmed by this bit of whimsy.

So we’re driving home, and from the back seat – out of nowhere – I hear this: “This is the part of the arm where there are two bones side by side. They’re probably like, ‘Hey, get away from me.’ ‘No, you get away from me.’ ‘I can’t, we’re attached!’”

I assured him that the bones almost certainly said things like that. Once I quit laughing. And got the car back in the correct lane.

This is the same boy who got a stuffed facehugger for his birthday. (Yes, it came from me. “It is just what I wanted,” he said, quoting – I think – from Word World.) Firstborn has never seen the Alien movies, but I must have explained them to him at some point: after opening his present, he carefully explained to both sets of grandparents how the monster grabs your face and lays an egg in your chest, and then an alien monster pops out of your chest.

Also, he can actually pronounce “Nyarlathotep”. (Yes, he has a plushy version of the Crawling Chaos, too.)

I know there are people in the world who wonder if their children are actually, y'know, theirs. Some people even need paternity tests to be sure. But some of us never have to wonder…