Hobbits and Misfits

Daddy is finishing up The Hobbit with BC, who is thoroughly enjoying it. When I had her brother at the doctor's office today for a hideous cough and an ear infection, she and her daddy sat down to read "a little bit." Twenty-five pages later, they were mere pages from the end. She didn't want him to stop reading! But she was listening pretty intently.

During the last battle, when Bilbo is injured but has forgotten to take off his ring and no one who is hearing his cries can find him, Daddy said to BC, "Why can't people find Bilbo?"

"Because he's invisible!"

"That's right! Why is he invisible?"

"Because he's wearing his ring!"

***

Later this evening, we had one of those moments you want just to bottle so you can either laugh your tail off 3 years from now or relive them and cry.

BC was watching Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer with her daddy while I put her brother to bed. I came back to the basement where they were and she was sobbing. Absolutely sobbing. Shnuffling and crying and whimpering. I said, "What in the world happened?"

"She's crying about Rudolph," said her dad. "She feels really sorry for him."

I was gobsmacked. That had never occurred to me. In fact, I think I would've been mocked soundly if I had reacted that way as a kid.

But sure enough: When Clarice is scolded by her father for hanging about with "red-nosed reindeer," BC began to cry outright and said, "Poor Rudolph!"

My child has ten times the empathy I have. 


I will say, however, that at the end of the movie when Daddy said that he would read her A Christmas Carol on the basement couch tonight instead of in the living room, she announced, "Ok. You go upstairs and get A Christmas Carol while I stay here." Sir, yes, sir.