Couch Olympus.

Yesterday Ambrose thunders into the room and holds up each of his palms which have orange disks drawn on them with magic marker and says "Look Dad, I have God powers." He poses, crouched low with his arm straight out looking like Iron Man about to fire his repulsor or the villain from Iron Monkey, a corrupt monk who has mastered the deadly Buddha's Palm. He makes whushing sounds. "And look at this," he says, rolling up his sleeve to show me his upper arm. He has multicolored rings and patterns colored in around his elbow, forearm and bicep. "When I bring my elbow down like THIS," he says, miming the gesture of crashing it onto the table, "it creates a force like BOOOOOSH." He moves his hands as if to represent a shock wave.

He kept asking me to play with him last night and finally I agreed. We played "gods."

I was Poseidon. The couch was Mount Olympus. Apparently Lucas and I were Greek gods but Ambrose was THE God. (Fitting his role, he is pretty bossy and controlling). I wanted to be Hades but he wouldn't let me, because Hades is a bad guy, but I like this--usually his imagination is pretty violent. Now, every time I want to destroy villages with tidal waves he stops me, using his God powers to reverse the flow, because we are gods and we are supposed to be good. I don't want to discourage beneficence, however, I like the boys to have a sophisticated understanding of human morality so Elizabeth and I try to explain that gods are just like people, with powers, not necessarily "bad" or "good," and I quote Voldemort: "There is no good or evil: only power and those too weak to seek it."

The distinction is lost on Ambrose whose name, by the way, means "immortal."