Isobel: "Daddy, did you just say ABBA when you burped?"
Daddy: "Yep."
Isobel : "That's so weird, I always say that when I burp."
Daddy: "Really, that's a shock."
Isobel: "Seriously, I always say that when I burp. It usually happens at school. My teacher says it's not appropriate."
Daddy: "Really?"
Isobel: "Yep. One time at school I had a fart that sounded like a bell."
Daddy: "Like a bell?"
Isobel: "Seriously, like a bell but one with no air in it."
Daddy: "Wait, what?"
Isobel: "It sounded like Fhwee, Fhwee!"
I found a piece of paper the other day while I was cleaning. It was a picture that Isobel had drawn a while ago. It looks a bit like my Grandmother' s brown tea pot floating on a very blue ocean with nice green stripes and the caption on the picture read as follows; The Tiy Tannic dodid 300000000 yeers ago. Which translates to The Titanic drowned 3000 years ago.
Now I have to say that Isobel has seen the movie (the Kate and Leo version of events) more than a couple of times. In fact, I believe that every time she goes to Candace's house, they watch the movie. So at least a couple of times. And it affected her, stirred something deep in her brain that I didn't figure from a six year old. I think she gets it. She clearly understands ( at least a six year old grasp of it) what drowning is, she said the Titanic drowned...so her understanding of the time of the events is a little off. To her, it may as well have been three thousand yeas ago.
Now here's where it gets a little weird. Shortly after she first saw the movie, she started saying that she was on the Titanic. I didn't pay it much attention, she's a kid who is massively influenced by her surroundings. Remember the Adele song she claimed she wrote? 'Nuff said. So she was on the Titanic and I was in the Nixon administration or on the grassy knoll (I can never remember) and we all went to heaven in a little row boat.
"I was on the Titanic." she would say.
"Oh, were you? I'll bet that was fun." I would reply.
But she kept at it, not all the time but enough that I took notice of it. Whenever I mentioned the Titanic, she would tell me about how she was on the Titanic. Around the time of the hundredth anniversary, she spoke more of it.
"Alright," I thought. "I'll play along."
So the next time she said she was on the doomed ship, I decided to ask her about it.
I was watching a show about what caused it to actually sink or rather what caused the cataclysmic failure of all the fail safe devices that caused the ship to go down.
"What's this show?" Izzy asked.
"A show about how the Titanic sank."
"I was on the Titanic." she said.
"Really?" I asked. "Tell me what it was like."
"It was nice but there was a lot of walking," she began. "I remember the plates."
"Oh yes," I said. All the while I'm starting tho think that she is carrying this awfully far. I mean she has a vivid imagination but even that has it's limits. "What were the plates like?"
"The were white, I think they were white and they were dirty and the bottles were dirty."
"Really?" I asked. "What else? What was the rest of it like?"
The beds were nice but really small and they had stars on them and outside was cold and you could touch the ice."
And with that she bounced off. The history channel is like bug repellent for my children and they can only stand to be around it for so long.
Now I still wasn't paying much attention to it but I picked her up from school one day and one of her teachers smiled at me and said "You never told us Isobel was on the Titanic."
"Well, she does like to travel." I said flippantly.
I have said on many occasions, that I tend to keep an open mind where 'otherworldly' things are concerned. There was that kid a few years ago who was generally accepted to be the reincarnation(for want of a better term) of a world war two pilot. His parents weren't parading him around like a circus act, rather he was giving interviews and revealing things that only the pilot in question could have known. If I'm not mistaken, some of the dead man's relatives met with this kid and were quite convinced as to his authenticity...So why not my kid? Who's to say that she isn't the reincarnation of a now long dead survivor of one of the greatest disasters of the twentieth century? Why not Isobel? Because Isobel's Father is a dumb ass, that's why.
I decided to try and get her to tell me everything she could about life on the Titanic."I was on the Titanic." she said to me as I was watching yet another problem about how it sunk (incidentally it sunk because there was too much water inside the god damned boat).
"Tell me everything about it, what exactly do you remember about it." I asked her with more than a hint of eagerness in my voice.
"I don't know if I can remember a lot, it was a long time ago." she replied.
"This was it!" I thought. This seemed to be really happening.
"Try to remember Pick. It's important."
"You were there too, why don't you remember."
"Wait, what?" I asked. "What do you mean I was there?"
"You were there," she said. "We all went and we saw dishes and small beds with stars on them and dirty bottles and then we touched ice and went home."
Yeah...so last summer Isobel, The Boy and I went to a museum and saw the interactive Titanic exhibit. We saw dishes and small beds with the White Star logo on the beds and dirty bottles and many things the passengers would have touched and smelled and saw on that first and last voyage. At the end of the exhibit was a large piece of ice that you were encouraged to touch. It was Izzy's favourite part, she went back to touch it over and over again.
At the beginning of the tour, you were given a ticket with a name on it and at the end was a list of the names on the tickets. Some names were survivors, others those that perished. The Boy and Izzy survived. I did not...Dumb asses seldom do...
I guess I was as active as the next kid. I remember spending a fair amount of time outdoors as a kid and I had friends but I do remember spending a good deal of time alone, making up games and inventing horrific adversaries to run and hide from. Isobel spends a vast amount of time playing on her own and I am glad that she is self sufficient.
The last couple of days, I have noticed something that concerned me at first. From a distance, it seemed like she was constantly tripping over her own feet. Consistently every time she ran in the backyard, she was on her face after a couple of strides. I mean she's got flat feet but they've carried her just fine up until now.
I was out picking dandelions the other night and she was outside with me. She ran and fell and ran and fell and ran and fell. Over and over again. I decided to move a little closer to her to see if I could discern the problem.
She was playing tag with the minions...
"I don't want to be it!" she would yell and run away giggling. She would then (literally) fall flat on her face. She barely put her arms up, just enough to stop from mashing her nose into the ground. I get now why it looked as though she had been rubbing her face in the dirt- she had been rubbing her face in the dirt.
"Dang it you guys, stop tripping me!" she giggled as she fell, again.
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