Terrors

One thing that constantly amazes me is the way my friends’ kids, who are all the same age as or younger than Jack, can watch movies. All kinds of movies! Movies with scary parts! Jack cannot. I am always trying to find movies that we can watch and enjoy together, as opposed to watching Cars for the four frillionth time, but every movie that I can stand has scary parts. This is because Jack’s personal definition for “scary part” is a squidge wider than the average person’s. For example, we tried Ratatouille a month or two ago because I couldn’t think it of any scary parts, but I didn’t realize that Remy and the kid shouting at each other during an argument would count. We had to shut it off because of angry shouting. So. It seems we are rearing a sensitive soul. I guess it’s karma, because I am personally responsible for my siblings’ not being allowed to watch Scooby Doo.

Nora, meanwhile, is newly frightened of monsters, despite the fact that she keeps catching monsters in her hand and they appear to be only two inches tall. Nevertheless, we have to wave a monster stick around the room every night before she goes to bed just to make sure the room is cleared. (During the day, we store the monster stick on the kitchen blinds. It’s also handy for opening and closing the slats.)

And both children have been having nightmares fairly regularly. Nora had one recently that made her run to our door and cry, “I scary!” The poor thing was actually trembling with fright. Jack has at least one a week. (His are usually pretty scary too, but his most recent one which was based on his not getting any lullabies before bed. It was a bit harder than usual to work up sympathy.) But what this all boils down to is that we just never know if we’re going to sleep all night or not, and these are the last few precious weeks before the months of no-more-sleeping smack us in the face.

My battery is about to die, so I’m going to wrap this up with some unrelated photos of Nora eating a giant pickling cucumber like an apple, and of Jack standing next to the robot he designed and built with Andrew. He hasn’t decided on its primary function, but it does have invisible arms.