Who Wants To Die?

For a brief and glorious moment, Elijah and Luca loved The Simpsons. It was during the marathon a few months ago and, well, it was the only thing I allowed us to have on TV. But they did get into it.

However, unlike their usual TV viewing, FXX showed more than just commercials for Legos and Child Life Insurance (which Eli really, really wants to purchase). When FXX decided to run ads for the horror movie “Annabelle” they didn’t imagine the affect it would have on a seven year old and a five year old in Evanston, IL.

I flat our refuse to watch horror movies. Why would you want to purposely subject yourself to an unpleasant experience? It’s my same beef with eating sour candy.

From what I could gather from the commercials, “Annabelle” is about a family who is terrorized by a baby doll in a white baby gown. There are fast cuts and spooky music too. I think. I usually ran screaming from the room whenever it came on.

Elijah and Luca love her. She represents everything gleefully scary in the world. They spook each other out every night by claiming to see her in the room. They both have perfected dead-eyed Annabelle expressions. A quick note, I tried to take photos of them doing their Annabelle faces, but they couldn’t resist mugging for the camera. These aren’t good representations.

They also dragged their cousins into the act. They created a gamed called “Who Wants To Die?” It involves one cousin being Annabelle and wandering around the house singing, “Who…wants…to…die?” in the tune of “Ring Around The Rosie.” Then you kill your cousins or something. To be honest, when they play it Steve and I sneak downstairs to play Xbox and we just hear them singing and screaming.

Occasionally, the terror gets too much and Luca will start crying. And that’s when I have to come upstairs and yell, “No more Annabelle! Dad’s trying to play Xbox!”

A quick postscript:

Grandma Connie has a kid toy closet upstairs. Inside is a ventriloquist dummy based on the 1970’s duo “Willie Tyler and Lester.” Lester is, um, black. And for some reason, the kids all think Lester is Annabelle and they completely freak out whenever they go over to Connie’s.

There are at least four things wrong with that.