Last week, my husband did something very uncharacteristic of us — we made the kids an early dinner (tacos) and then used the TV as a babysitter, setting 14, 12, and 4 up with the movie, The Smurfs. We needed to have an adult’s only dinner and waiting until 9PM when 14 begrudgingly goes to bed just wasn’t going to work. The kids seemed to enjoy their time together bonding over a movie and so this ended up working out for all of us.

Since then, 4 has brought up ‘the evil guy’ from the movie (good ol’ Gargamel) and yesterday, it seemed like such a great way to start having the conversations that we, as parents, should have with our children. We used Gargamel’s evilness as an intro to what we can do to combat evil. 4 was upset — he doesn’t have powers like Gargamel, and so we talked about what powers he has: the power of kindness and his secret powers, his brain and his boice.

This seemed to give him something to think of and I’m trying to figure out how to connect that more explicitly to the Black Lives Matter movement, especially given the small gathering we plan to attend later on.

There is still a lot of explaining to do and many discussions to come over the next days, weeks, months, and years but this is definitely the start to our future understanding the powers he holds just by being him.