cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ida is Becoming a Crack Shot Ida has been practicing her marksmanship lately and in the last few days she's had a major breakthrough. A while back I got her a little kid-sized single-shot .22 rifle with a pink stock. Naturally it is not something that she has access to except under my immediate supervision. 'Immediate' as in only handing her the rifle when we are putting it on the actual sandbag and I am sitting 6 inches beside her and ready to grab the barrel in the event that she points it in an unsafe direction. Not that I have ever had to do that, on account of her having been drilled on firearm safety since the age of 2 with a pretend wooden rifle that I made for her. Ida has no context for a rifle as either a toy or a tool of aggression against other people, so she approaches it in much the same way as she does any of our other tools. Anyway, the stock is still a bit too long for her but she manages pretty well anyhow. Last weekend, the proper use of the the sights finally clicked and she started hitting targets. A lot. We practiced some more after work yesterday and Trish came out to watch. She was stunned. I was stunned. Even Harry was impressed. We have this set of spinning metal targets and she was nailing the littlest one in the middle again and again and again. Ida is absolutely thrilled at being able to hit that target. She didn't want to stop practicing until it was getting too dark to see. We're going to practice more after work today, and I'm going to move the targets farther away. With no encouragement from me, she has declared gunsmoke to be her favorite smell in the world and makes a point of sniffing the open chamber every time we eject a casing. Since she clearly has a real talent for this, I feel that I ought to do whatever I have to in order to get her a stock that really fits. It is hard to find one that fits a 5 year old who is on the small side. I would just cut down and reshape the one already on her rifle, but it's a hollow plastic thing and that doesn't really work. I need to find a wooden one for her model and reshape it for her, but it has proven impossible to find the part without getting a whole new rifle. If worst comes to worst, I might try getting a piece of walnut or laminate and making her a stock from scratch. But that is a lot harder to properly do than one would expect. 9:44 a.m. - 2009-07-01 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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