"Sleeping Beauty Is My Favorite"

While she still enjoys Cinderella, the princess who keeps losing her shoes has been replaced as Haley's favorite. Her current addiction is Disney's version of Sleeping Beauty. Its been the sole resident of the DVD player for weeks now, and she asks to watch it constantly.

Nicole and I are always concerned about what kind of media content is appropriate for Haley, and as a result, we've been "editing" some of the movies we show her. In the case of Finding Nemo, we skip past the shark scene. In The Little Mermaid we jump past the death of the Sea Witch. And for a long while, on Sleeping Beauty, we would skip the scene where the evil queen turns herself into a dragon. As far as we could tell, Haley didn't realize what we were doing, and simply thought that the prince escaped from the evil queen's castle, happily ever after, and roll credits. No 50 ft tall purple fire-breathing dragons.

But then the other day, Nicole picked up the DVD remote to skip the dragon scene, and Haley protested. "Mommy, don't skip the dragon."

We stared at her. We didn't even know she knew the dragon scene existed. We didn't even know she knew the word "dragon" for that matter. We asked her if the dragon scared her. She said no and reiterated her request that we allow her to watch it. (Keep in mind that this is the same child that runs from the room when we use the blender.) So we relented. The dragon scene doesn't seem to bother her in the least. Now if the evil queen turned into a 50 ft fire-breathing blender, we'd probably still have to skip the scene.