It seems that my daughter has reached the age where she must start experiencing some rites of passage. And by that I mean she is apparently old enough to watch older PG movies that we liked as kids. It all started with a home maintenance project and culminated on YouTube.
Last week we had someone out to clean our chimney and, well, it wasn’t good news (see my prior post about it). My wife started thinking about the movie The Money Pit and included in her post about the issue a clip from the movie that she found on YouTube. My daughter enjoyed watching the clip as well as a few others, so this weekend we went out to Blockbuster and rented the movie. We enjoyed it together and I had to explain very little (partially due to her luckily not knowing what to ask questions about – e.g., the controversy over supposed infidelity). She spent much of the rest of the weekend pretending that she was stuck in a hole in the floor or that it was raining through the ceiling.
The shift to other memorable movie experiences came in the form of another YouTube video that I shared with my wife of an interesting tribute to John Williams. My kids loved it and would dance to it and were repeating lines from it all day on Sunday. After seeing this video with them about 5 times, my wife chimed in that I should really show our daughter the Star Wars movies (I love my wife). So now a new bonding ritual that I apparently will have with my daughter (and presumably my son when he is old enough to pay attention to such things) is to expose her to the cinematic treasures of my youth … well the treasures according to me at least. She will become very familiar with Harrison Ford very quickly. Of course our study of the Star Wars compendium will start at the beginning.