Jedi Mind Tricks

My SWTOR guild website has a "getting to know you" thread with 20 fun questions.  One of them asks, "How often have you tried to force choke or use Jedi mind tricks on someone?"

I answered that I'm a mom, so I do it all the time.  "You do not want to disobey me. You will pick up the shoes you left in the living room." Sometimes I'll even do that little hand wave in front of my face. (Ask my kids.)

Well, yesterday, my 8-yr-old proved she's been paying attention.

It was school Spirit Day at her rural school, which shares a campus with the high school and so shares their Homecoming week celebrations.  The kids had been frantically running around the house, finding their requisite green and white to sport in support of the basketball team.

The 8-yr-old, with her unique sense of fashion, had dressed herself in white tights, white capris, and a white turtleneck, with a green and white dress-up cheerleader costume over it.  As the bus was driving up the hill and preparing to turn around at the cul-de-sac before stopping in front of our house, I reminded her to get her winter coat, which is blue and pink.  I couldn't see it by her backpack.

"Where did you put your blue coat?"  I asked her.

"Mom, my coat is green," she replied.

I understood she would rather be wearing only green and white, but the fact of the matter was her coat was blue.

"No, it isn't. Where is that coat?" I said, a little anxious now that the bus was getting closer.

She turned to face me and with that gesture characteristic of all Jedi, waved her hand in front of her and said, deadpan, "My coat is green."

I stopped in my tracks, stared at her and burst out laughing.  Mommy stress diffused, she turned around and picked her less heavy coat off the hook--a light green coat which had completely slipped my mind.

As she headed out the door with her sisters, I couldn't help shaking my head in amazement, still chuckling.  She surely is a precocious little Jedi.

The Prodigy

Yesterday when my husband returned home from work, he heard a call from behind my computer.

"Dad!  I need help with this boss!"

It was our 8-yr-old, who had stayed home from school that day with a nasty cold, along with her teenage sister.  My headphones looked like big Princess Leia buns on the sides of her head, while her eyes peered up through her glasses around the monitor.  Her Jedi Knight was somewhere in level 12.

"Ok, honey, let me get my smuggler."

As he headed out with her, he found to his surprise that the boss she was trying to tackle was an elite target in her class quest . . . a level 16 elite located at the Jedi Temple ruins on Coruscant.

What??  (No wonder she couldn't take it down herself . . .)

He came to discover that this little twerp really had somehow managed to run her class quests all the way to this point, without help from anyone in the family.  (The sick teenager plays Sith.)  What's more, he realized there was no way his smuggler of a similar level was going to be able to help her.

There was only one thing to do, given all the work she had done:  bring his level 16 Jedi Consular Shadow and help her finish her quest.

The sum total of this adventure is that our 8-yr-old's Jedi Knight now has her ship plus her first two companions . . . at level 12.

I don't suppose this should surprise me, given that this kid at age 7 was trouncing opponents in World of Warcraft's Goldshire on her rogue . . .

I'm sure there are those who would say we should have made her wait until she was closer to level 16 instead of helping her with that last boss.  But after all the independent thought and effort she had put in to reach that point in her quest chain, it seemed right to reward her initiative and raw nerve.  (Nobody needs to teach her to "Improvise, Adapt, and Overcome"!)

Maybe I'll let her display the Legacy name, after all.