The Visitors

Hazel and Charlie are obsessed with being 'visitors'. Every night right before dinner they announce 'I'm going to be a visitor', walk out the front door, and ring the doorbell. When they come back in, they announce their new identity, which ranges from 'Emmelisa', to 'Bob the Builder', to 'Basketball Guy'.

The best part of all this is that they act really grown up (or at least their perception of really grown up) all during dinner. They say things like 'Oh, really?' and 'well isn't that nice'.

The really strange part is that when they sit down to dinner as visitors, they invariably start by saying 'Hazel and Charlie are dead. We saw them die' and then launch into some gruesome story which involves disobedience to cardinal rules of traffic safety. It goes something like this:

'Hazel and Charlie were chasing a ball out into the street and they got runned over by a car, and then they got up and started walking down the middle of the street and then they got runned over by the ambulance.'

I'm sure this lays bare all sorts of deep Freudian issues that can only be blamed on their parents. Lacking any deep Freudian wisdom, however, we mostly respond 'that's really too bad--we liked those guys' to which Hazel will reply, in her most grown-up voice:

'Me too. But we're going to come live here now instead of them'