"I'm going to rip your head off and drink your fluids!"
So said my four-year-old daughter the other day, much to my horror and dismay. Like any good (or at any rate peer-pressured) parent, I obsessed about where she could possibly have picked up such a repulsive and scary concept. Could it be the girl next door? Have I been talking in my sleep again? Maybe I'd misheard. "What sort of fluids?" I asked. "Blood! Brain juice!" She returned, with such obvious glee I felt like sending her to the nearest Catholic priest and asking for an exorcism. It turned out to be a line from "Shrek", of all things - apparently the single line in the whole first film she liked enough to memorise.
Since she learned to use the DVD player I've had to be very careful indeed. My collection of 80's hack-and-slay movies are hidden in the bedroom, but she still ocasionally gets one over on me. A month or so ago I got up at about 8.00 a.m. to find her lying on the couch with a bowl of mini-sausages and relish watching "Interview With The Vampire". The final credits were rolling, complete with "Sympathy for the Devil" - she pointed casually at the screen with a relishy sausage and commented "That man's a vampire, he's going to bite that other man. We've got this song on the computer, haven't we?"
Her latest exploit was with "Shaun and the Dead" - this is a very funny British zombie flick; if you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it (but possibly not for the under-5s). Anyhow, I thought I was pretty safe with this one; for starters it was on a white read/write DVD with no markings whatever, for seconds it was about the fifth item on the index, and for thirds the DVD player belongs to my partner and all the onscreen instructions are in French. So it was a great surprise to me when, stumbling through the lounge en route to a cup of tea yesterday morning, I heard my little angel say (with fairly mild curiosity now I come to think of it) "Mama, why is that man eating that other man's stomach?". "Entrails!" I corrected her sternly, before realising what was going on and lunging for the remote control.
It doesn't help that my particular area of interest fiction-wise is horror, SF and fantasy. I have a lot of books, and a lot of them have very odd covers indeed. Occasionally my girl will come wandering in with a book and ask "Who's that, Mama?", I'll throw a casual glance and a sentence like "It's the Demon Asmodeus and it's mine, now put it back" will escape me before I realise what I'm saying, let alone who I'm saying it to. My partner tells me that she'll need years of therapy to get over a childhood like this, although I personally think that's a bit rich coming from a man who spent considerable time and effort convincing her he's a vampire. Although I must admit she's liked him a lot better since, though what that says about her (and him) is perhaps a bit worrying.
So I'm slowly coming round to the opinion that any fairly bright child will unerringly pick out the most embarrassing and/or inexplicable part of any material available to them and repeat it at the most embarrassing possible moment. If we had any maiden aunts, she'd talk about monkeys having sex on the Discovery Channel; if the Vicar ever came round for tea, it'd be Modern Satanism. There was a "Show and Tell" at her school last week, and I let her take in one of my many statuettes of Buddha. "And is your Mummy a Buddhist?" inquired her First Grade teacher innocently. "Oh no, my mum's a witch," replied my lovely little girl. There goes my nomination for School Governor then.
Since she learned to use the DVD player I've had to be very careful indeed. My collection of 80's hack-and-slay movies are hidden in the bedroom, but she still ocasionally gets one over on me. A month or so ago I got up at about 8.00 a.m. to find her lying on the couch with a bowl of mini-sausages and relish watching "Interview With The Vampire". The final credits were rolling, complete with "Sympathy for the Devil" - she pointed casually at the screen with a relishy sausage and commented "That man's a vampire, he's going to bite that other man. We've got this song on the computer, haven't we?"
Her latest exploit was with "Shaun and the Dead" - this is a very funny British zombie flick; if you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it (but possibly not for the under-5s). Anyhow, I thought I was pretty safe with this one; for starters it was on a white read/write DVD with no markings whatever, for seconds it was about the fifth item on the index, and for thirds the DVD player belongs to my partner and all the onscreen instructions are in French. So it was a great surprise to me when, stumbling through the lounge en route to a cup of tea yesterday morning, I heard my little angel say (with fairly mild curiosity now I come to think of it) "Mama, why is that man eating that other man's stomach?". "Entrails!" I corrected her sternly, before realising what was going on and lunging for the remote control.
It doesn't help that my particular area of interest fiction-wise is horror, SF and fantasy. I have a lot of books, and a lot of them have very odd covers indeed. Occasionally my girl will come wandering in with a book and ask "Who's that, Mama?", I'll throw a casual glance and a sentence like "It's the Demon Asmodeus and it's mine, now put it back" will escape me before I realise what I'm saying, let alone who I'm saying it to. My partner tells me that she'll need years of therapy to get over a childhood like this, although I personally think that's a bit rich coming from a man who spent considerable time and effort convincing her he's a vampire. Although I must admit she's liked him a lot better since, though what that says about her (and him) is perhaps a bit worrying.
So I'm slowly coming round to the opinion that any fairly bright child will unerringly pick out the most embarrassing and/or inexplicable part of any material available to them and repeat it at the most embarrassing possible moment. If we had any maiden aunts, she'd talk about monkeys having sex on the Discovery Channel; if the Vicar ever came round for tea, it'd be Modern Satanism. There was a "Show and Tell" at her school last week, and I let her take in one of my many statuettes of Buddha. "And is your Mummy a Buddhist?" inquired her First Grade teacher innocently. "Oh no, my mum's a witch," replied my lovely little girl. There goes my nomination for School Governor then.
posted by holojojo at 1:48 AM
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