What Are Your Children Watching?

"Mom, Mom," my four-year-old said in my face last week. I strained to open my eyes, coming reluctantly from a deep sleep. "What?"

She looked at me with a completely straight face. "I found a Mimzy." She showed me a pink bunny she'd received in her basket last April, nearly seven months ago. Mimzy is the name of the stuffed bunny in a show we'd watched the night before, The Last Mimzy. The little girl in the movie looks a lot like my child, long brown hair and all, but with the next sentence the connection became surreal.

"Mommy, Mimzy's going to die . . ." Dramatic pause. Just like the girl in the movie when she told her parents her Mimzy, an advanced technological device from the future, was dying. I was instantly awake. I mean, this was weird. Had this family friendly movie, somehow damaged my daughter? A tremor of illogical fear rolled through me.

". . . if she doesn't get pancakes," my daughter concluded, reminding me in a instant that it was Sunday morning, pancake day, and that I'd already slept until ten. I laughed outloud--belly-laughed. She was quite the little actress. (Boy, I'm not looking forward to her turning fifteen).

My laughing didn't amuse her for long. "Hurry, Mom. She needs pancakes now, or she's going to die!" Nothing for it but to mix up a batch of blueberries pancakes, only instead of spelling out my daughter's name with the batter, she wanted me to spell Mimzy. By the time the pancakes were ready for consumption, she'd warned me so many times that Mimzy was dying, that I was quite sick of hearing it and actually started wishing that Mimzy WOULD die.

Oh, wait. Mimzy's a stuffed animal.

That thing goes practically everywhere with her now. I've already had to fix the thread on the mouth. Seven months of complet and utter neglect and now the bunny is center stage. The power of film. I'm really glad she's mimicking The Last Mimzy instead of films like John Tucker Must Die. My sixteen-year-old got this second film to show at her birthday party, but I had to stop it in front of a room full of teenagers. What a utter piece of dirty garbage. Sadly two of the girls had already seen it, and they saw absolutely nothing wrong.

Parents, do you know what your children are watching?