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Week 264: Games, Babbling, and Pooka Head February 17, 2009
As you may know, I'm trying to turn Sam into a video gamer. So far, this has met with great success, as the chimes of her Game Boy Advance can usually be heard downstairs breaking the morning silence most weekends. I did have one hiccup the other day, though. For her birthday I bought the Lego Star Wars game and a second Xbox 360 controller, which allowed her and I to each take control of one of the game's characters and play cooperatively. She needed help with some of the tricky jumping parts, but otherwise really surprised me with how quickly she picked up on the game.
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However, at the end of the Episode I story arc we got to the point where the little Lego Darth Maul kills the little Lego Qui-Gon Jin and gets cut in half by the little Lego Obi Wan. It wasn't gory (there were no little Lego blood spatters or anything), but pretty clear what had happened.
Sam's initial reaction was stunned silence, and a desire to keep playing, but then she had another delayed reaction about an hour later as I was getting her ready for bed. She started crying and describing the above scene, wailing that "It made me feel a way in my head that I never felt before and I can't stop thinking about it!"
It actually took a bit of work to get her calmed down, and I never really did understand what emotion she was feeling. She insisted she wasn't scared, but she lacked the vocabulary to say anything else. Was she feeling sadness? Shock? Regret? Anger? I never really did find out.
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It hasn't seemed to dampen her enthusiasm for gaming much, though. Yesterday she had a fever and while Ger and Mandy went over to Grandpa's house Sam and I spent most of the day on the couch. She seemed quite happy to sit and watch me play the new Prince of Persia game, and later that night over dinner she regaled Geralyn with stories about the guy who could run on walls, the puddles of black goo, collecting the sparkly things, Princess Elika's wardrobe (we had a side debate over whether it was "ripped" or simply "tawdry"), the glowing circle things that made you fly, the Hunter's sword that split into three swords, the pit we got knocked into, making the flowers grow, and how good Daddy was at the game.
Geralyn did her best to look interested, but it was clear she had no idea what Sam was talking about --and understandably so. It occured to me that this is what my parents must have gone through when I babbled on about Star Wars of G.I. Joe as a kid, or what today's parents endure when their kids start going on about Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, or whatever. Only I did know what Sam was talking about, because we had experienced it together. And that was extremely cool.
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I suspect that Mandy is also trying to make her mark on popular culture. Though the phrase was originally coined by Sam, Mandy's newest favorite thing is calling things, people, or places "pooka head." She uses this slanderous term at every conceivable opportunity. If you take away a toy, she yells "NO, POOKA HEAD!" If she bumps into the coffee table, she'll glare at it and mutter "Pooka head table."
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I don't even know what "pooka head" means, but it's got that certain quality endemic to all catchy things. I've started using it myself, and honestly I won't be surprised the day that I wake up to find that it has spread virally across our culture. It'll then become a Saturday Night Live catch phrase, and perhaps the Pooka Head Dancers will appear on some Spike TV awards show. It'll happen. Just you wait and see.
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Parenting
Tags: Amanda, Parenting, Samantha
Comments
Posted by shawn on February 18, 2009 9:56 AM:
Hey Pooka Head!
What were they cooking?
Posted by Patti on February 18, 2009 10:12 AM:
Kai's also well on his way to gamerdom. He's even learned which games Mommy plays vs which games you just have to ask Daddy for. His current high score on Wii bowling beats mine by about a hundred points and he's recently won his first set of tennis AND game of baseball. I shouldn't be proud, but I *am* impressed.
Favorite line of this post: "If she bumps into the coffee table, she'll glare at it and mutter 'Pooka head table.'" I can just hear her disdainful, annoyed, invective inflection in my head. That's my girl. Well, she isn't.. but.. you know... llama.