If he asks you, Superman does love daal!

Vir: Once there was a baby shark in an aquarium. He was very hungry. His mamma went to him and said what happened fish? Baby shark said I'm very hungry. So the mamma shark went to the big sea.

Me: And then what happened? This is a great story!

Vir: Hmm?

Me: You're telling me a story, right?

Vir: Yeah. Oh then....the mamma shark got the baby shark some meat!!!!!!!! (exclamations owned by storyteller)

And that's the exciting end to Vir's first ever coherent piece of original fiction! This is a very important development. Until now, his stories have typically taken sudden and very unrealistic turns. For example:

"...and the rabbit was crossing the river. And suddenly Superman came in and flew towards the rabbit and picked him up and flew into the sky!!!!! And then a car came and landed on the road and there was an askadent."

or

"I was going there and then there was a big fire and I flew to a lake and picked it up and threw it on the fire and I was so strong!!! And there was a car and another car and a Honda city and an askadent."

So Superman is obviously the latest obsession. He's Superman. I'm Spiderman. Tara is Supergirl. And there are a variety of Badmen throughout the day, including me when I tell him to do something he doesn't like. My dad seems to have started this obsession and he's paying for it dearly because he now has to spend hours (I really literally mean hours) making up Superman stories to tell him. You can tell he's reached the bottom of his story trunk because they're getting more and more boring. Some of them could really make you slip into a little Superman story induced short coma. I'm pretty sure that has happened to mom and me at least a couple of times. I know because I woke up dazed once and the last thing I remembered was Superman wanting to go to the bathroom and Vir not wanting to go. Or something like that.

The upside is that we're using Superman to great advantage. Vir loves doing stuff around the house now. If you want him to go throw something in the trash for example, you just need to give him a couple of seconds to put on his Superman outfit first so he can fly to the trash can. Or you can get him to eat his bowl of daal because that's obviously Superman's favorite food. One day of course, he'll know. But hopefully he would have consumed a fair bit of protein by then and Superman would have done his job to help this little kid:-)