Sunday, March 26, 2006

The Gift of Fear

1. So we rented this somewhat cheesy but informative video, "To The Hospital". It has a dancing puppet skeleton and live-action kids who tour different hospital departments.

   There's this scene (apparently -- whenever I watched the video this scene had been carefully fast-forwarded past) where a kid falls down on the playground and breaks his arm, or something.

   Aviva was scared the first time she saw it, and when Aviva gets scared, Noah gets terrified. So for a while he wouldn't look at this video, and if it were discussed, he would start to scream.

2. He calls the video "Loppity Goes To The Hospital". We're never sure who Loppity is, but he(?) figures prominently in Noah's internal cosmos.

   Q: "Does Loppity go to the doctor?"

   A: "No it's not Loppity goes to the doctor it's Loppity Goes To The Hopsital I'm SCARED FOR THAT!"
   

3. Our friends who we visited in Texas always say Grace -- Thanksgiving-style Grace, where you hold hands and take turns talking about what you're thankful for. We like this, so we've kept it up, mostly, since we returned.

   Noah's turn is always the same. He waits patiently until he's up, then says with a big grin:
   

   "Thank you God for Loppity Goes to the Hospital -- I'm scared for that!"

4. After he started saying that, he was okay watching the video again.

5. But then we returned it to the video store.

6. That's still Noah's favorite prayer.