It should come as no surprise that I am doing my best to instruct my children in the Tao of Ganelon. These are the True Things that some weak souled parents will obfuscate from their young, and in doing so make them vulnerable. Of things Import, I have started with the basics: Kill the Zombies.
My 7 year old daughter has been playing Left For Dead for a month or so…and it has changed her. She is some rough new beast that speaks of puppies and Molotov cocktails. She loves Hannah Montana and Zoey, thinking both are perfectly acceptable role models. While some avoid Witches…she goes out of her way to blow there heads off.
True story: We were visiting my grandmother a couple of weeks ago at her retirement community. As we were in the elevator, some saintly gray haired woman joined us and was enchanted by my daughter’s curly hair. As she was doting on her, my daughter mentions, with the sweetest of smiles, that “There is an elevator like this in Left for Dead… but it’s covered with blood!!” Her eyes sparkling on the word “Blood”. The old woman had a look on her face like “Did…did… I just hear what I think I heard from this little angel?”. The awkward silence was equal to any one of the best moments of my life.
Yes, my girl is a new creature… and the Old Ones fear her power.
A cohort at the office is stunned that I let her play such a violent game. He tells me his son, a full year older, hesitates to enter the living room for fear of watching something “too violent” and having the ever warned “bad dreams”. To which I can only reply “When the Zombie Apocalypse comes, be assured my daughter will save your son from the flesh eating hordes.”