Ready Or Not, Here Come The Light Sabers

Late Blooming Dad often teases me that I went to a commie-pinko kumbaya touchy feely private school. He's exaggerating, of course, but the Friends school I attended (Friends schools are run by the Society of Friends, otherwise known as Quakers) did emphasize peace, made community service a requirement of graduation, and required everyone from faculty to students sit together in a silent meeting house for twenty minutes every day at the start of the day. They also banned toy guns, decades before the school shootings that plague American society today. If you were caught with so much as a dime store water pistol (remember dime stores? But I digress ...), you were sent home for the day and your parents were taken to task.

Naturally, as a mom, I try to limit my kids' exposure to violence, but there's only so much one can do.

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The Slapstick Gene

My son has it.

Way back when he was two, we'd put on a Baby Einstein video featuring farm animal puppets, and he used to laugh hysterically at this bit where a horse puppet ignored all the food on a table and instead munched the flower in a vase.

He giggled uncontrollably at the pig puppet who pushed another pig puppet down a slide into the mud.

He cracked up in another scene with an elephant puppet trumpeting and blowing the other puppets over.

At three, we began to selectively expose him to classic Warner Bros. cartoons. Not only would he laugh in all the right places, he'd force us to back up the video so he could view the same bit again and again -- and each time, he'd have the same explosive response.

Just this week, I sat down with him to watch an episode of Ian Falconer's OLIVIA, based on the popular picture book series.

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