THE WAY OF THE WORLD

Children are natural story-tellers. With little experience and limited vocabularies, they try to fit new discoveries into what they know. That can mean roleplaying as favorite TV characters, determining the cat is a gumball machine after she vomits kibble in front of him - it's the same basic principal, minus the feeding of spare change - or performing the same ritual over and over again until their little brains have finally digested it.

My son is three and a half. At the moment, he is simultaneously convinced of the following:

• That everybody he knows is a character in the kid's show The Octonauts (This is actually a pretty good show. It's educational and low on the irritating background noise scale)
• That he is the Dread Pirate Roberts

• That Peter Pan's shadow regularly latches on to him and causes mischief around the house (Ask me how much I like this one. >:(   )
• That he is the commander-in-chief of a snow fortification in front of our house called Fort Burrito. (Don't laugh. That thing is booby-trapped to the frozen hilt!)
• That his dreams take place in an alternate reality called Engine City, where things move very fast and one must always be alert to villains intent on stealing one's ice cream and sandwiches. The bastards.

Meanwhile, with decades more experience and a decent grasp of how the universe works, my world consists of:

• Get up
• Go to work
• Cook stuff
• Clean stuff
• Pay bills
• More work
• Think about sleeping in, kind of sleep in
• Think about working out, don't work out

Which of us is better off, I wonder?