Of a brave little girl

My daughter and I are huge fans of Disney movies, the classics and the new (Frozen anybody?!). We have a ritual; I bring home a set of DVD’s, hide the familiar looking ones (she’s obsessed with Simba from lion king, so any movie that has a lion will be watched ad infinitum. I am still recovering from Penguins of Madagascar). So I pick one that she will enjoy and maybe relate to, pick any lessons where we can. The flavour of this month has been Aladdin. We swooned over Jasmine, were mesmerized by the cave of wonders and terrified when Jafar turned into the biggest python we ever saw and promptly ran out of the sitting room. So much so, she now calls it the snake movie.

Evil villain++

In spite of all the dramatics involved (running and hiding during parts with Jafar) she has insisted on watching the movie every night. This behaviour lasted till a few days back. This particular night, we settled in front of the TV to watch our movie as per usual, when it got close to the part where Jafar turns into a snake, she got up and went to the bedroom and returned with her maleficent stick (The staff from Maleficent, she got a makeshift one) so anyways, she stands in the doorway, waits for Jafar to turn and runs towards the TV brandishing her stick. I literally flew to grab her before the stick hit the screen and held her. And there she was fighting to hit the snake in TV with all her might. It was a highly entertaining sight. Luckily, Jafar was turned into a genie and locked away in a lamp soon enough.

I did not think any of it until yesterday when I told a friend this story and when we were done laughing deliriously, he went,”I suppose that took a lot of courage.” And it hit me then what a brave little girl I am raising. She watched Jafar turned several times and ran and hid. Then she decided this one time that she was done running, she was going to do something about it. So she armed herself and prepared to kill the “snake”.  I can’t believe that I am now profoundly inspired by my 3 year old. We face snakes every day, in several aspects of our lives, and we keep running and hiding. It’s about time, we picked up those sticks, looked fear squarely in the eye and killed it.

Bisous.