Army Men.

I love conspiracy theories. Area 51, the JFK assassination, Brangelina... I eat that stuff up. I watch the History Channel late at night and wonder, just maybe...
However, I do not enjoy when conspiracies are designed to affect me. Movie theater popcorn (you buy a bucket, and you HAVE to buy a drink), moms who say that c-sections are fun (we've been over that one), and now, army men. Not the kind who devote their lives and safety to protecting the ideals of our country. The plastic kind. The ones you're probably staring in their dead, plastic eyes right now, not suspecting a thing. Yeah, those...
Since we have boys, we have lots of these guys. In various colors and sizes. It's like a melting pot of armed forces figurines around here. Being boys, my kids love to play aggressively with them. Shooting, hunting, chasing, jumping, policing, warring, mooing... they'll play any game with them. Loudly. And they usually spit a lot. But my boys are not at the center of this conspiracy. Oh no, they're none the wiser. It's the army men.
Once the games are over and the kids are in bed, the army men gather 'round and come up with their plan. I know this, because it's always a different plan. They lay out their strategy maps and speak in grunts too low to be heard from the master bedroom. Once a plan of action has been agreed upon, they set it into motion.

You wake up at some point, either to pee or to respond to the cries of a child. You stumble through the dark, disoriented, disheveled... barefoot. You can't hear it, but this is when Alpha Team gives the go signal. A small, dark, hard, pointy army man is dispatched to a location never before known to be indigenous to their kind. The hall, the carpet, the bathroom... Once everything is in place, all that remains is your contribution - your bare, unsuspecting foot.
You bounce off of hallway walls as though being tossed by waves on a rocking boat, too tired to walk a straight line... or turn on a light. And then it happens. The most softest of places within the arch of your feet comes down, hard, with all of your weight, on that evil little army man. Everyone's sleeping, so you can't scream. It's not bleeding, so you can't get sympathy the next day. But dear GOD it hurts. You can kick the army man if you want, try to get your revenge on him. But he's plastic. And it'll only anger him for the next time.

And now that we've found out we're expecting a girl, I can only assume that Barbie and her tiny accessories wreak the same kind of havoc.