The Military Gene

My family is very pro-military.  On my side of the family, I have relatives who served in the Army and the Navy.  And my husband has family members who served in the Air Force and even attended the Academy.  I just assumed that it was the knowledge that we have direct family connections to different branches of the military and the knowledge that our Grandparents served in major historical conflicts that has ignited the interest in military history in my house.  But now I'm starting to think that the military attitude is genetic.  You know, it's just in your blood.

I have this new theory, because last night I found my 1 year old son playing with toy soldiers.  My mom had brought the boys a bag of plastic soldiers the day before and my oldest son was really excited to play with his "warriors."  But last night, my youngest was sitting on the floor by himself and talking to the army men.  When I walked into the kitchen, he had men lined up on different sides of the tile floor. The green soldiers were on one side, and the brown were on the other.  Then I looked at what he was doing.  He was holding a green soldier and he was making it fight the brown soldier with hand-to-hand combat.  Then suddenly, a bunch of brown soldiers got knocked over.  He had created a war.

How does this happen?  How does a 1 year old child understand what to do with toy soldiers?  He probably watched his brother play with them at some point, but this little guy knew exactly what he was doing.  Sound effects and everything.  This is not something that he was taught.  It's like he had this innate instinct how to create a war!

Needless to say, Daddy was thrilled.  His little boy likes to play soldier.  Daddy can't wait until his boys are bigger so we can recreate the Battle of Gettysburg in our living room with civil war toy soldiers and cannons.  I can already imagine the field trips that we'll take to the actual battlefields someday too.  Daddy now has a war buddy.

I tried to take a picture of the little battle in my kitchen last night, but once the little guy saw the camera, he started following me around saying "cheese."  Oh well.  I'm sure there will be many more battles to come.