My wife sure can pick ‘em. She took the kids to the library and the kids wanted a book on whales. They love whales and nature. I was reading it to them tonight and it started to get more and more graphic.
- It kind of started with a whale in a net. When questioned on the net, I said, “Oh, those men on the boat were just playing hide and seek with him”.
- Then, there was some blood-filled water from a recent whale killing. I said “Oh, he must have gotten a bloody nose by bumping a ship or something”.
- Then, there are Japanese harpooning a whale, then a dead rotting carcass on the beach and it was pretty much downhill from there…
Apparently, the book was affiliated with Greenpeace or something (nice, happy whale picture on the front – the horrors of the human plague by page 3) and the kids were horrified by the time I got to the end – but I couldn’t just stop reading the thing to them cold, I didn’t want to abruptly stop as if what I had said previously was false. Well, they’ll have to learn what people do to each other and animals someday; just figured 5 and 3 was a bit young. I guess we need to skim library books from now on for gratuitous violence.
Maybe we’ll go back to Magic Schoolbus tomorrow night!
