Friday the 13th – Scaring my Kids

Happy Friday the 13th! Today, we took our kids back to Museu Arqueológico do Carmo to see mummies. The first time Darian was really scared, and I assured him there were no dead bodies in any of the tombs because I didn’t know about the mummies. In the hilarious video below, he totally loses it when the last tomb has a body. Now I’m totally paying it with his night terrors. I didn’t know!

Darian’s biggest fear is dead legs. Not the kind when your leg false asleep. No, no. The dead legs that chase you down the street. I showed him the hilarious YouTube video of the dog dressed up as a spider that scares people because it’s hilarious. It gives him nightmares. I should have seen that coming, but I was 100% blind. I queued it to the part with the dead legs.

I wish I could take back showing him that video. He likes scary things, so I thought he would think it was funny. Now it’s turned into a nightmare for everyone.

The first day we went on a walk in Lisbon, we were walking back to our house, and Darian mentioned something about the dead legs. I acknowledged his fear (like I read to do in a book) and assured him that there were no dead legs any where. And what do you know?! There was a mannequin leg hanging in the tree on the next block. I KID YOU NOT. While I started laughing, Darian was bawling and running like a lunatic. Again, I thought he’d see it was plastic and not care. It ruined the next couple nights of sleep.

The next time we walked past that spot, we made sure there was no dead leg in the tree. Then a couple steps forward, there was a giant animal bone on the ground. You have got to be kidding me.

Now everything has gotten exponentially worse with this mummy. The feet poking out of the sarcophagus pushed him over the edge. From my perspective, I could only look down and see the feet. Not really a big deal, right? But at his level, he looked directly into the sarcophagus, like looking into the VHS player. His little eyes could see up the toes, to the feet, to the ankles, to the shins, to the knees, and up the legs into the darkness that surrounded the top of the body. Freaky!

Today, when I got down to his level, it totally freaked me out. Maybe it’s a metaphor?

At any rate, today Darian was so excited to show Papa and Grandma (Hector’s parents) the mummy, so we went back. He wanted to see what they thought.

Tonight, he was scared of the skeletons. I asked him if he was scared they would come and hurt him. He thought exactly that. So we talked about how bones can’t move without mussels, tendons, and ligaments… not to mention a brain, a heart, blood, and a pulse. He was fascinated by muscles and realized the skeletons could not walk, but then screamed when I sent him to bed.

When I was little, I was scared of a giant whale that looked like a brain. In my dreams, it was trying to eat me in swimming pools and the ocean. One time, in a dream, I was walking down a dock, and someone pushed me into the ocean. Guess who was waiting to eat me? Soon, I had a hard time getting in the pool for my swimming lessons. I immediately got under the water and scanned the bottom of the pool. Oh, good. It’s not here. But could it suddenly appear? This fear was exasperated with the Are You Afraid of the Dark? ‘s episode with the monster or zombie suddenly appearing and rising out of the swimming pool.

So fear. Lots and lots of fear. The opposite of fear is love. I think of Angelina Jolie playing Maleficent. In the first Disney movie, we feared Maleficent. In the second, we loved her because we knew her (and Disney changed the story a bit). So this next week, we are going to learn about the mummies’ lives and how people are mummified. But maybe leave out the part about slaying the Pharaoh’s wives when he died and ripping their brains out through their noses, yeah?