Emotional Development

I'm always happy when I see my kids learning, growing, maturing. Yesterday, both kids showed some new emotional development; one made us happy and the other made us kind of sad. I'll start with the sad...

I was at the DI, where I always like to check out the Disney movies for sale. I saw Lion King there and bought it for Tess to watch. Last night after dinner she was watching it, and really liking it. Someone came to the door, so Bryan & I were outside talking for a few minutes. When we came back in, I noticed that Tess was absolutely distraught and had giant tears in her eyes. I asked what was wrong and, crying, she said, "there were some mean guys and they killed the lion's daddy!" And then she started sobbing. I felt so horrible. I truly (cluelessly) didn't even think about the scene where Mufasa dies when I bought the movie. I just figured--hey! It's Disney! It's rated G! It'll be fine!

I started thinking about it and Disney movies have people in them dying all the time, then I realized that it's only the "bad guys" who die. Lion King is the only one I can think of where a "good guy" dies. Anyway, our sweet daughter suffered sorrow for the first time yesterday. It kind of broke my heart. She wanted to turn the movie off and said, "maybe I'll watch it when I'm bigger, like 5 or 9."

But, on to the happy development, Miles is starting to develop his sense of humor and it's really cute. We were watching Wipeout on TV (I guess it seems like all we do in this family is watch TV...) and if you haven't seen that show it's basically just a bunch of people going through obstacle courses and falling off stuff, getting hit by stuff, just "wiping out." While we were watching, Miles starting cracking up everytime someone would wipe out. He had us all laughing at him laughing. Then a few minutes later he tickled me for the first time! He tickled my hand and said, "kih, kih, kih, kih" over and over. He did it again this morning. Pretty fun.