On Sunday, Vivian and Nora invited their best friend in the neighbourhood, Wyatt, to our house for a sleepover. Now, we were very clear on this that this wouldn’t actually be a sleep over. The kids would wear pyjamas, watch a movie, play a little bit, and then Wyatt would go home.
But then Vivian got this notion that sleepovers needed ghost stories. And she managed to get a good one from watching an episode of Alfred Hedgehog which featured a campfire tale and lots of headless bugs (the cicadas did it).
This is, you’ll remember, Vivian who gets very upset when watching movies with any sort of conflict or retribution in them. Thomas the Tank Engine is always getting in trouble, so it’s off our list. The Winnie the Pooh movie from Pixar last year was quite good, but we struggled to sit through the Heffalump movie which featured a little bit of peril before the happy ending.
But on the other hand, Vivian is now six, going on seven. She’s matured in a number of ways. She watches the news with poppa Eric and asks us questions about the world. She laughed at Lorne Elliot’s song “I Like You (Nootka the Killer Whale)” which features a heck of a lot of death and destruction at the hands of an orca and a great white shark. And now she wants to tell ghost stories. And she’s taught the other kids to play “Weeping Angels Tag” (okay, I taught her that first). Is she moving on from her earlier fears?
As I was thinking about this, I asked Erin if maybe we should see if she’d enjoy some more older stuff on television, like Doctor Who. Specifically, I asked, “I wonder if they’d enjoy Blink.”
Then, by coincidence, I heard three wails down in the basement where ghost stories were being told, and three sets of footsteps pounding up the stairs. “Scary!” they shouted “Scary! Ghosts!” And the rest of the sleepover was conducted in the living room with the lights on.
Well, I guess that answers that question.