Well, not a dingo - apparently it was a coyote. :?

Background: SS7 really loves his military stuff. Tanks, guns, artillery, if it can kill someone you can bet he knows all about it. He watches hours of History Channel and Discovery, and can rattle off details of famous battles, important dates and names of generals better than some history majors I've met.

So naturally, SS7 has LOTS and LOTS of toy weapons of all shapes and sizes. Cap guns, nerf guns, foam swords, model tanks, GI Joes, etc, etc. The other weekend when BM dropped him off, he came in with a real doozy - it was a frickin' SPITBALL RIFLE. The damn thing is over 3 feet long and shoots little paper balls that you wet with water... the website claims it shoots 100 feet with a "soft SPLAT action" but whatever, they're spitballs, and it's pretty gross. Cool, but gross. Needless to say the spitball gun went back to BM's when she took him the next weekend.

Fast forward to weekend. BM shows up Saturday with SS in tow (so she and SO could work on their taxes, ick) and another new gun, a giant nerf rifle this time. He's got the spitball rifle too, but the thing is crushed on one end. I'm helping SS put the new gun together while BM and SO are fiddling with Turbotax, and he proceeds to tell me all about what happened to the other one:

SS7: "Mom got me this new gun because the other one got broken."

Me: "Oh no! What happened!"

SS7: "I left it outside, and a coyote came and dragged it to the road! It got run over!"

Me: "..."

SS7: "But that's okay, it was out of ammo anyway and this one is way cooler!"

Me: "...well, you never know what those sneaky coyotes will get up to..."

So I imagine that the rifle was left in the driveway and BM or her SO somehow managed to run just the end of it over. It got crushed somehow, and TBH I couldn't really blame BM if she decided to regret buying it... }:) Spitballs indeed. But what a story! Oh, and we're in MD, apparently there *are* coyotes here, but in 10 years, I've never seen one. Just couldn't help thinking about the "Dingo ate my baby!" story...