Every mother who has ever read Calvin and Hobbes likes to think she's raising her own version of the boy terror.

I think I am too. I also think I have pretty solid case:

Calvin is 6. Sammy is 6.

Both have yellow hair.

Calvin is the Dictator-For-Life of G.R.O.S.S. (Get Rid of Slimy girlS,) a club formed to torment Calvin's nemesis and secret crush, Susie Derkins.

Sammy refuses to the let the girls down the street into his secret fort behind the house, then gets mad when they could care less. "Girls stink!" Sammy declares and vows never to play with them again. (Until tomorrow.)

Maybe I should be alarmed. Calvin isn't exactly a model of good-boy behavior.

But then again, he's the master of his own destiny. He throws snowballs, looks at the stars, searches for bugs under rocks and builds armies of snowmen to annoy his dad. He builds time machines out of cardboard boxes. True, he builds them to get homework from 8-p.m.-Calvin so that 7-p.m.-Calvin can goof around, but at least he's building time machines.

He's all boy. In the water-fight arms race, Calvin grabs the hose while Hobbes drags over a swimming pool. Sammy doesn't have water fights so much as he turns the hose on whoever comes outside whenever he's supposed to be watering the tomatoes.

Sammy - much like Calvin, I imagine - drenches without prejudice. Or mercy. Whole insect colonies have met their demise at the end of Sammy's Water-Powered Ant Destructo Ray.

Calvin builds an entire universe by the sheer force of his imagination. Sammy's imagination has both impressed and scared people he meets. Yes, if you don't know about Sammy's obsession with dead, twitching presidents, it can be shocking. But then you think, "Well. At least it's original."

For the last several weeks, Calvin and Hobbes has been just the latest in a string of crazes that grab Sammy by the ears and won't let go. Don't think I haven't used it to my advantage. Telling him it's time to read Calvin and Hobbes is the only way I can get Sammy to go to bed.

But last week, I recognized the true potential of Sammy's idolization of Calvin, Boy Genius.

We'd just read the last strip of the night and I closed the book with a laugh. Sammy's smile evaporated and instead showed real, 6-year-old panic.

Monsters really did come out in the dark, he told me. Alone in his room, nobody could protect him.

But all kids sleep by themselves, I told him. Even Calvin.

No, he corrected. Calvin has Hobbes.

That's when I turned into Kristy, Mom Genius. I found his favorite snugly, a stuffed cheetah, buried in his bed covers.

"Well, you have this cheetah, just like Calvin has Hobbes," I said. I flipped to the pages on which Calvin and Hobbes outwitted the drooling monsters lurking in the shadows. They used darts, baseball bats, logic and buckets of water balanced precariously over the top of the closet door.

Sammy's expression changed again. (I'd say sort of sly and sneaky: Think of Calvin sitting in the classroom, about to shoot Miss Wormwood with his Atomic Napalm Neutralizer gun.)

"You just have to name him. Then, when I walk away, your cheetah can come alive in your imagination just like Hobbes does. So what's its going to be?"

"Um. Cheetah."

And so it was. I tucked the covers under the chins of Sam and Cheetah and made sure to say "Good night" to both. I turned out the lights and left the two to fight off the monsters in whatever way they deemed necessary.

The next morning, I had neither been shot by darts nor drenched with a bucket of water. Somehow, Sam and Cheetah had beat back the monsters themselves.

And I sent Sammy to school to daydream of Tyrannosaurus Rexes and the daring intergalactic adventures of the intrepid Spaceman Spiff.

Reach features editor Kristy Gray at (307) 266-0586 or kristy.gray@trib.com