May the Force be with you
Ah, the Star Wars movies. Joel and I have dreamed of the moment when the boys would watch the movies instead of having us retell the story verbatim over and over again. Do you know how hard it is to tell six separate stories in detail because Dexter is a detail kind of a guy? Do you know how hard it is to listen to the Star Wars movie sound track and have to link music to story? ”Mommy, what is happening now? And now? And now?…..” After trying to watch the original Star Wars movie a couple of months or so ago and having the boys bolt at the first sign of Vader, we gave up and thought it would never happen and then bam – we’ve now seen movies 1, 2, 4, 5 & 6. We’re skipping 3 because we didn’t want to expose the boys to brutal deaths of nearly every character from the first 2 films, and to spare them an further exposure to Hayden Christensen’s acting. Now they know what the Force is all about. Little did we know that they would start using it against us.
It started with random light saber battles that strangely enough, always occurred right before bedtime. Now, even though they are on the good side of the Force, they have developed their Jedi ways to use against Joel and I. Good thing Joel takes his Force immunity pills each morning – very important if you want to finish a meal without choking, either on the food or by the hand of a Sith. I tend to forget. Oops. Today, Nicholas looked at me, smiled, raised his hand and started to pinch his fingers together. (For those of you who are a bit rusty on what that means, that is what Darth Vader used to do to strangle people.) Seeing that I am Darth Katieus, I regularly try to strangle them with the dark side of the force. Their force use is better than mine and I’m the one that collapses to the floor, out of breath. Although, sometimes Dexter will to or our Force battle will collide and knock us both to the ground. This using of the Force actually works really well when I’m mad, like last night before bed. Instead of yelling at Dexter to go to bed, I used my dark Force stranglehold on him. He grinned from ear to ear, jumped up, raised his arm, and tried to Force strangle me. It made me laugh and the bedtime routine resumed peacefully. It is an excellent tension reliever.
At lunch today, in unison, Dex and Nicky turned to us, raised their arms and pinched their fingers in the direction of Joel and I. Joel’s use of the force is much stronger than mine and he was unaffected. He was a little overconfident, though, after Dexter’s attempts to use the Force to strangle him were unsuccessful. Dex was whispering, and Joel leaned over to hear better, and Dex skipped the “Force” part of strangling and just went for the jugular. I, however, collapsed with choked laughter because of their grinning smiles and the fact that they threatened to tape me to the wall and have Joel look after them so they could “break all the rules.” After the past three days of looking after all of them, I really didn’t mind that thought. Joel has found out that waving his hand in front of Dexter’s face and saying “you want to finish your peas” really doesn’t work.
Also, in order to watch all the battle scenes, the boys needed to have their guns with them – oops, I mean, “blasters.” At the first sign of trouble, aka bad guy, they would fire away. It didn’t matter if they were just in their underwear, (we had to strip down after home haircuts today), they would sit cuddled up in the chair, ready to fire. As the battle of Endor was heating up, Dex grabbed his bowl of Jelly Bellies (our typical haircut sit-still incentive), ate one, grabbed another and pushed it into Nic’s mouth. ”It’s bravery pills, Nic! They’ll help you be brave!”
One of my favorite memories of this time with them was during a rather poignant scene when C-3PO was carrying a dead Jawa to a fire pit. We try to skip the worst scenes, and Joel had just fast-forwarded past the part where Luke discovers his aunt and uncle’s bodies, but he hit play a little too early. We were trying to skip around the fact that all the Jawas were dead when Nicky asked what was happening. Dexter, deadpan and matter of fact, “those are just dead Jawas, Nicky.”
Joel tried to scare them tonight, telling them about the terrible monsters on Endor, and how scared he was when he was younger, but the boys weren’t buying it. ”Those are just Ewoks, Dad. Nobody’s scared of Ewoks.” Then Joel failed again when, while watching the AT-ST Walkers walk through the forest, he said to me, “How cool would it have been to see this on the big screen when it was first released?” I replied, “I did.” Apparently he’s forgotten how afraid he’s supposed to be of me, and it isn’t safe for him to make me feel old, especially with my Birthday only 4 days away…
For now the movies are done, but already the boys are asking about movie 7. At least we can honestly tell them we don’t know the story, and we’ll all just have to wait together – because you know how well that works with almost 5 year olds, right?
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