Day 775 | Bad Guys
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How did it work out, you might ask? Not great. We watched about 20 minutes before he willingly agreed to turn it off because he was basically watching from behind me. He didn't cry during the movie itself (which has happened in the past during mild Thomas the Train movies), so that was a step in the right direction.
It went downhill from there, however. About an hour later, he started having a lot of questions about bad guys, both pretend and in real life (there is a black blob of a bad guy in Fern Gully that he was not a fan of). The sniffling and tears started soon after.
We tried several attempts at easing his mind and finally Chris came up with the idea to draw a picture of the bad guy from the movie (he read about it helping with fears) and Chase latched onto the idea whole-heartedly.
First he requested my drawing. I'm the one who watched the movie, after all. Once I finished mine (the top picture above: a pretty good representation of the black blob and the tree it was housed in, in my opinion), he ran it upstairs to have Chris draw the same image (the bottom picture). When Chris finished, Chase came back downstairs to inform me that "Dad's is gooder" than mine. Can you believe that?!? He didn't even know what he was drawing! Chase did clarify shortly after that mine was still "really good", so that was a small consolation.
The drawing strategy worked for a bit and our nightly routine ensued until bedtime (no surprise). He started to get worried about real life bad guys again and after a pretty lengthy Q+A, he fell asleep feeling comforted by the fact that we have a neighbor police officer (true) who is working tonight (maybe true?) and offered to drive by the house as many times as Chase wanted (definitely not-so-true). Chase requested "um, like...900 maybe," so Lieutenant OZ will be driving by 900 times tonight if he asks any of you.
Whatever works.
