(Sigh.) OK. Hello, welcome to Agrabah.
I'm here to make you happy Jafar.
Oh, I'll be quite happy, thank you, as soon as I can get rid of that street rat Aladdin.
(Swings a magic wand) You're happy!
What's this? I'm smiling. I don't feel like taking over the kingdom anymore. What is this feeling?
You're happy Jafar. (Stage whisper: Now tell Iago that I made you happy.)
Iago! I feel happy now- I don't want to be mean anymore!
Now you're Cruella DeVil...
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And so on. This is playing, to a 10-year-old, Disney-loving, PDD-NOS having, kid. We cover all the villains. Believe me- all of them. I'm proud of myself when I crack a good joke as Hades or Captain Hook, and Henry has to struggle to stay in character.
He is supposed to be Mickey Mouse in this scenario, and I imagine he's seen the plot in an episode of House of Mouse or something? Perhaps he came up with it on his own, but it's more likely that he's adapting a familiar script.
Whatever, it's somewhat imaginary, and carries a good-triumphs-over-evil message, so we'll keep playing.
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We've had a busy and wonderful fall, with lots of family visits and a little bit of travel. Both kids have enjoyed themselves and held up pretty well, but we could see things starting to wear on Henry by the last couple weeks of November.
The weekend before Thanksgiving my brother arrived from Chicago for a visit, and the first thing Henry said to him was "I wish you would never leave." Right away I thought of our friend Charlie who, before something fun even begins, often starts to worry about its end. Henry did a lot of arguing and back-talking and worrying that weekend, and eventually we hypothesized that he was excited/anxious about Thanksgiving.
It really pulls at my heart that he looks so forward to something until he doesn't know what to do with all that excited energy, and it turns against him as anxiety. We are trying to learn better ways to talk about this, and help him understand it.
All weekend Henry kept repeating "I will not make a cherry pie", and we were like "fine, whatever, no one's going to force you to make a cherry pie." Then, the day before Thanksgiving, I helped his class make pumpkin pancakes. (So cool to see the kids all working together in this inclusion classroom). His teachers were all "Henry keeps telling us about the pie he's going to make!" Who can figure that kid out?
He never did help make a cherry pie- Grandma made it all by herself- but he ate the entire thing. Not all in one sitting, but within 24 hours. It was gone. Bill and I were reflecting on the meal- that Henry stayed at the table longer than he ever has before. Maybe we've finally got him trained. Then we remembered the pie and decided that maybe he's the one who has trained us.
5 comments:
OMG, Gretchen that last line made me laugh so hard! Yep, kinda like the way my cats have me trained. ;-)
It's so hard, isn't it, to figure out if "up" really means "down" or whether "yes" means "maybe". *sigh* xoxo
I feel the same way about having Griffin "trained" and just like you I think that he has actually trained me LOL. The cherry pie thing is so funny, it is almost as though he knew that he was going to end up eating a whole cherry pie, but that he wasn't the one who was going to make it. What a cutie!
Insert Super Mario Brothers and Cheesecake and I could have written this. Truly!
i love that last line. yes. he's got the pie thing all figured out!
One of my favorite posts. I love the idea of "villains made happy". And I love the Thanksgiving memories.
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