Star Horse

A few months ago, I remarked to another mom at church that I hadn’t seen her son not wearing a Spiderman shirt in at least several months. She said, “Oh yeah, he won’t wear anything else. He’s very into Spiderman.” Had he seen Spiderman? I wanted to know. Nope, she assured me. “He just saw it on a lunchbox or something and that was it.”

Another friend reported that her sons, ages 2 and 5, talk about Star Wars basically nonstop. “They’ve probably seen about twenty minutes of Star Wars, total, ever,” she said, “but they can’t stop talking about it.”

And now Star Wars has landed here. Silas has seen absolutely none of any of it. He wanted a new coloring book, so I got out one that someone had put in JC’s Christmas stocking a few years ago. It featured scenes from Episode 1. Perhaps they got this for him as a joke.

Something in it spoke to Silas, to the center of his being. JC told him that Star Wars is a movie, and since then, he has asked every day if he can watch it. We don’t happen to own it, so I can truthfully say that we don’t have it. He doesn’t mind too much. He lives in that universe in his head. He talks constantly about it, asking me the names of the characters in the book (“That one’s Jar Jar. He’s Daddy’s favorite.”) and describing the scenes as he colors them (“I’m giving the boy horns.”).

Thanks to it being permanently stuck in my head, he’s learned Weird Al’s “Yoda” song (and can spell “Y-O-D-A, Yoda”). It’s the latest thing he begs me for, at least hourly. Serious self-restraint has kept “The Saga Begins” a secret…so far.

I told him that the finger puppets Katie made him for Christmas were people from Star Wars. He found this very exciting, and they have been in heavy rotation. We bought a Star Wars lift-the-flap board book at the library book sale (who knew that such things even existed??) and he has been spending hours moving the finger puppets around in that pretend space.

He talks for them, invents whole relationships, develops story lines. I’m amazed at some of the stuff he’s gotten “right”–“Dark Fader has a little boy and a little girl. He is like a daddy.” “This girl [Leia puppet] and this boy [Han puppet] are going off to getting married.” Then there are the things he gets…adorably not-right–“Chewer and Dark Fader are friends.” Oh, and somehow his Grinch finger puppet is involved, too. And sometimes a shark finger puppet comes along and eats them all.

I don’t mind it, much. I know this is a phase he’ll grow through. I have absolutely no intention of letting him watch the actual movies until he is 5 or 6 (the Original Trilogy, that is. If he wants to see Episodes 1-3, he can wait until he is in college and out of my house). As long as he doesn’t know that there aren’t any horses in “Star Horse,” it’s a great imaginative landscape for him to develop his storytelling skills.

He said, “Luke, stay away from the darker side, and if you start to go astray, let the Force be your guide,” Oh my Yoda! Yo-yo-yo-yo-yoda…”