Hammer and the Beast

One of the science experiments that my 6 year old daughter did involved removing the ink pack from a marker pen, draining its ink, mixing the ink with water, and finally watching the ink glow in the dark. (The intent was to learn about phosphorescent materials).

Removing the ink pack from the marker was impossibly difficult. So I took out the hammer to crack open the pen and pull out the ink pack. My daughter had this astonished look on her face and said:

“I didn’t know we had a hammer in the house!”

It reminded me of what Ser Jorah Mormont said in Game of Thrones:

“There is a beast in every man and it stirs when you put a sword in his hand.”

Apparently, a hammer has the same effect! I could see the manic glee in my daughter’s eyes at the prospect of going to town with the hammer. I shuddered at the fact that she seemed to share Calvin’s view on hammers:

I scrambled to find a way for her to use the hammer without destroying something in the house. The solution? Ice, a large monolithic slab of it, box-size. I kept it in the bathroom, and let her swing at it. She had a fun time, pulling back the broken pieces, smashing them again and again, until all that was left was water.

Now I can only hope that it’s out of her system. Or that she will only use an ice slab in the bathroom to release her cave woman instincts. After all, to a girl with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.