After spending the day crawling in and out of our homemade “fort” (aka: the bunk bed, lots of blankets and a flashlight) I opted to spend about an hour on Sunday night playing a video game with my son. There are some nice learning websites that you can take young kids to go play, but Hazen decided he wanted to play Mommy’s game. And at the risk of sounding like the biggest geek …
Well … I really am a big geek, so there’s no risk here. So I’ll just tell you — It was Star Trek.
Hazen got to fly the space ship, which made me a little dizzy but he was giggling so I just let him go for it. I mean, I love Star Trek. It’s relatively safe as a game because it has no blood and gore to splatter across the screen, and if you look back on the show you see how it really highlighted the core elements of humanity whilst coming into contact with “new life and new civilization.”
I suppose I should thank my Mom for pretty much forcing me to see every episode of Star Trek there ever was. I might have grumbled about it for a year or two, but I grew to really love it. (Especially the Next Generation. I never really liked the girlie Troy’s character — too vulnerable and wimpy for my tastes — but Data was absolutely fascinating. And when I was young I had a crush on Wesley.)
Anyway!
So I caught Hazen saying we were going to “kill” the Klingon’s and alarm bells rang, so I told him; “No. We don’t kill. We have stun-phaser’s, so they’re not really hurt. They’re just … forcibly sleeping.”
*cough*
Then he caught me cheering when we blew up an enemy ship and he said; “No, Mamma, we don’t kill.”
Thoroughly chagrined, I agreed. “No, we didn’t kill them. We just destroyed them.”
…. And in the back of my head I was like; ooooh, that is so not better.
So I tried to compensate; “The ship was empty. It was just a computer. A robot.”
And Hazen said; “Like a Borg!”
Ah, parenting. I think the game is rated “PG” or something like that. All I have to say is … this “Parental Guidance” certainly failed.
AJMaguire 