For many months, I'd been thinking that the film Tangled was near perfect, as far as Disney movies featuring princesses go. This is largely because I adore Donna Murphy and she rocks her scary-manipulative-mom song, but also because I love the spirit of adventure in the movie and that Rapunzel and Eugene are flawed and multi-dimensional characters. My three year-old loves Tangled as well, so much that she's taken to offering me her own dramatic rendition of the film as she follows the action on our small tv screen.
This development started off rather sweetly; Sadie would run off to find a comb so that she could groom her (rather short-ish) hair at the same time that she watches Rapunzel do the same. She even shuffled over to me, holding a handful of her hair out for me to grab, and indicated that I could use it to speed up my entering and exiting of the tv room similar to Mother Gothel with Rapunzel's hair in the movie. I should have predicted that she'd want to hold my hands and stare into my eyes while the lanterns were floating around Rapunzel and Eugene in their rowboat on-screen. Her intensity was a bit unexpected, but Sadie's pretend play still struck me as charming.
Sadie's dramatics took a more daring turn this weekend, as the "I've Got a Dream" musical number in the Snuggly Duckling prompted her to jump up on our coffee table and dance sing along, complete with jazz hands and arm flourishes. Apparently, she's got dreams, too. And needs to sing about them.
Next, I saw that one of the windows in our family room was wide open. Those windows start at the floor and reach up to nearly the ceiling, and thus are covered by security bars. Everyone can easily reach through the bars to turn the lever and push the windows open, which Sadie apparently started doing, having noticed that no one uses a door in Rapunzel's tower - they climb in through the window, of course. The problem with this - well, one of many problems with Sadie playing with the windows - is that it's not manipulative parental figures that will come in through our open family room windows. It's going to be potentially tropical-disease-carrying mosquitos and other insects and small reptiles (and probaby not as friendly as Rapunzel's chameleon friend). The petty thieves around here who would love an open window are not as harmless as Eugene, so it's probably a good thing that those security bars are narrowly-spaced. Safety-wise, opening these windows could lead to curiosity about other windows in our house, and I don't want to go there.
This G-rated film is seriously starting to wreck some havoc on my home! I think that I need to put our pair of cast-iron frying pans into a locked cabinet before Sadie gets any ideas about arming herself like Rapunzel :)
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