The Mind of a Child

At first glance you may wonder what these two pictures have in common. To the common eye water is the only similarity. But in the eyes of a four year old, that is more than enough.

The first image is a screenshot from Joshua’s video game, Alphabet Park Adventure, on his V-smile gaming console. The point of this particular game is to steer your inflatable rubber duck (partially concealed by the large letter H) across the screen matching your duck's letter with the picture that starts with the same letter. Not much of a challenge. However, when I entered the room, my 4 year old appeared engrossed in the game and was frantically guiding his duck all over the screen obviously having added an additional element to the game.

We now come to the second picture above. It is a screenshot from Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean – Dead Man’s Chest in which the Kraken, unleashed by Davy Jones, is attacking a ship. We recently rented the movie which Joshua enjoyed thoroughly and he renamed it Jack Sparrow. (Can you tell who his hero in the movie was?)

Back to the scene I walked in on, Joshua then turned to his 20 month old sister sitting beside him and warned her in his lowest, scariest, and most dramatic voice, “BEWARE THE KRAKEN!” He then proceeded to float around the screen letting out a constant stream of “whoaaaaaa”s as if a monster could pop up at any second and bring his alphabetically inclined “vessel” into the briny deep!

Of course, me and my bad puns, I returned the warning telling him that what he really needed to watch out for was the Quacken! But hey, he passed the level so if my son wants to motivate himself to learn with the help of a giant mythical creature, who am I to argue?