While we were eating dinner tonight (hamburgers… yes its relevant) the subject of pirates came up. Ruby is very concerned about pirates, and how they might steal her or eat her. She asked what we were going to do about pirates, so we (of course) took the opportunity to turn the question around…

Parent: Do you have any ideas Ruby?

Ruby (immediately) : I know, we could make a note that says “Pirates don’t steal our boat”, and we could put it in a bottle and send it to them, and then they wouldn’t steal our boat.

Me: That’s a great idea Ru, but some pirates are so mean that they wouldn’t even care if you wrote them a note, or maybe they couldn’t even read it.

Ruby (thinks for a moment): Oh! I know, we could keep an eye out (exact words, I swear) and when they come we could see them through a telescope or something, and then we could run away somewhere safe where there are no pirates and we never see them ever again.

Me: Ruby, that’s another great idea, but they would probably have a motorboat and we’ll have a sailboat, and their boat would probably be faster than ours.

Ruby (immediately): We could buy a motorboat for a while and tie our old boat up with a special knot, one of my really bad ones, that nobody can untie but me, and then we could go faster than the pirates.

Ruby (un-prompted this time): If they got us we could get a very sharp knife and cut them in half and hang them from the very highest part of a tree.

Miles: Hurt

Ruby: … and I’ll stay in the boat with Miles because he might be afraid of the pirate eating him and we can play games in my bed

Miles: signs food; makes chomping sounds (i couldn’t make this up if I wanted too)

Ruby: Or another thing we could do — I learned this from Dora — is fill them up with pepper, that would make them cough us up if they ate us. But if we eat them we could boil them and then bake them and then make pirate burgers (with peppers).

Okay, that last part was a little disturbing to me too, but she just said it in her little singsong matter of fact way that makes “We’re going to have a sleepover tonight” seem like the most wonderful idea ever to grace your ears. Watch out world, here comes Ruby, the Solver.

p.s. Dear readers, I really didn’t make a word of this up, I actually got out a pad and took notes at dinner because I knew early on that it was blogworthy material.
p.p.s We did discuss more “conventional” methods for avoiding and dealing with pirates.