The love Aliya has for her Daddy is so precious. She trusts every single thing he says and does. It is 99% of the time a great thing, however, the other day we had a 1% of the time moment.
Nate a few years ago walked out of our house and a bear was right in front of him, we watched the bear run up a tree with our trash and then he fled into the forest. It was an amazing moment and like most amazing moments the story has been retold hundreds of times. I refer to it as The Great Bear tall tale. This story has grown over time to include a magical scene of a mighty Nate wrestling the bear and saving his beautiful wife from certain demise. It is a great story, but much like Johnny Appleseed and Paul Bunyan if you believe it to be fact there could be problems.
That brings us to a few days ago, the school was practicing lock down drills and Aliya and I were talking about the reason. The conversation went like this...
Me: "You have lock down drills to practice in case something unsafe is outside and the teachers need to make sure you stay safe in the building".
Aliya: "Like what?"
Me: "Well a bear on the playground is one example".
Aliya: "Well, that is silly mom. If there is a bear outside I will just go out and wrestle it like Dad did!"
I then, elbowed Nate and gave him "the look" that said please explain this is unsafe to your daughter.
Me: "Well, Dad wants to tell you something about that story."
Nate: "Yes, you should never wrestle a bear unless you are big like dad is."
Me: "AND..."
Nate: "You can run really fast?"
Me: "AND...that...story..."
Nate: "IS A GREAT ONE!"
Me: "NATE!"
Nate "What???"
Me: "That story is not true!"
Nate: "Oh, yeah...that too."
They say that once a tall tale has been shared enough the facts and the fiction start to get blurred. Apparently, that has happened in our wonderful story of The Great Bear.
