[HPforGrownups] My animagus/nightmares

[Amanda Lewanski]

No: HPFGUIDX 4538

Aberforths_Goat wrote:

> > When I was a small child, my mother always used to say, "Night, night.
> > Sleep tight. Don't let the bed bugs bite".  I don't recall thinking, "What
> > bed bugs? Are they lethal? Gemmeouttahere!" - there was just something
> > comforting about the rhyme.
>
> As it stands, that old rhyme is outdated and possibly detrimental to a
> child's development of a healthy assertiveness.

Develop, hell. My children were born with a healthy assertiveness. My children
try to exert that assertiveness on their parents and world every waking moment
of every day. I defy you to spend one day with my daughter, especially, and not
start teaching her every passive rhyme and story you've ever heard in some vain
hope of denting her assertiveness. This is the girl who spent day before
yesterday being Little Miss Muffet, and I had to make a hand-spider come down
and say boo, so she could shriek and run away, who then decided it was her turn
to scare the spider. The things she did to that spider. Ow. Sigh.

> It instructs kids to go through life hoping bad things won't happen to them.

And they should go through life hoping they will? It says "don't let the bedbugs
bite," not "sit there and take it." Sounds pretty active and assertive to me.

And now I'll bite---who or what, if anything, is Aberforth's Goat? Every time I
see your signature I think of my friends, who misheard the song line "Ain't no
woman like the one I got" for years as "Ain't no woman like a one-eyed goat,"
and they wondered how they could play it publicly....

--Amanda