PERSONALLY: dogzilla

Captain is a quirky little kid in alot of ways. Long ago he invented an imaginary character - The Chinese Moose - that has been secretly living in our house and yard for the past two years. I think he may be in love with the Progessive Insurance girl. But his primary quirk is his persistant fear of random, non-scary things. Such as Grover in this book, the old lady in Ratatoullie and Count VonCount's girlfriend on Sesame Street. All of those things will send him into crying hysterics. For awhile I thought nothing could be more terrifying to Captain than the Count's girlfriend, but I was wrong. There is a horrible new monster in his world: Dogzilla.

We make a weekly visit to the local library for storytime and some new books. Captain and Chunk are both avid "readers". About three weeks ago Captain borrowed a book titled Dogzilla - a very cute and funny story about a city of Mice that is invaded by a Corgi when he smelled their BBQ cook-off. Dogzilla does not eat the mice - it is a decidedly non-violent story - but he does chew their furniture and bewilder them with stinky dog breath. Captain was happily obsessed with Dogzilla for an entire day. Then around bedtime he started to view it a little differently. He woke in the middle of the night with nightmares and actually came to sleep in my bed (something he hasn't done in years). The next day he started refusing to be in rooms by himself because an ancient volcano might erupt, releasing Dogzilla into our house. He tearfully told me he wanted to "return Dogzilla to the library and never ever borrow it again!!!". It went on like this for days and I cursed Dogzilla while I tried to find away to convince him that he was not at risk for attack by a gigantic dog. I finally stumbled upon something that helped a little bit. In the story, the captain of the mouse military is able to drive Dogzilla away by threatening to give him a bath; all dogs are afraid of baths of course! So we now have bottles of shampoo, bars of soap, washcloths and toy firetrucks (for spraying water) strategically placed throughout the boys' bedroom. If our house didn't resemble a mental institution before, I'm pretty sure it does now. We're just a few short steps away from wearing tin foil hats to ward off aliens. But at least Captain is sleeping soundly again.