Movie night

There don't seem to be movies that Ellie is afraid of. Linda wanted to watch Pirates of the Caribbean about a week ago. We decided to give it a try and turn it off if it was too much for Ellie. I was just sure that animated skeletons would be over the top. Now she asks every single day if she can watch the "pirate movie."

Because I'm a bad parent, I figured I could go even scarier with the kid (as long as she doesn't start having nightmares). So we started the Fellowship of the Ring. I figure that a girl who can handle skeletons has a pretty good shot at handling orcs.

Not much scares her, and the stuff that does is not what you would expect. A huge monster with tentacles and lots of teeth is attacking the main characters, everyone is screaming and hacking at it with swords; Ellie isn't phased. A mass of misshapen semi-humans are attacking from all directions; no problem. A couple of characters are sitting on a rock having a conversation; that somehow is very scary.

In any event, she seemed to enjoy it, so we watched Return of the King tonight. Afterward, we ran around the house whispering ominously, "precious..." We talked about hot lava, which Ellie is very interested in, and we pretended to drop the ring in the fire.

Smells like rehab

We watched The Lord of the Rings when we were at Rusk, so watching again tonight brought back vivid memories for Linda. She said, "I can smell the hospital." I didn't remember that, but I remarked that I could still feel the bed. It was a surprisingly hard bed. We would set the back up and bring the video player over on a hospital table to watch movies. It wasn't very big, but it was enough to escape for a few hours. It's kind of a nice memory.