Recent Caspian News

• Caspian has a persistent imaginary friend - "Robot Bunny". Robot Bunny came about a few months ago, and has gone on walks with us (often needs to be carried), is featured in drawings, and in comparisons to the Ostara Bunny. He wrote a letter to Ariel (the Little Mermaid, upon whose lap he sat and chatted with at Disneyland) telling her about Robot Bunny. Last night, when asked "who moved that (something)?" he said that maybe Robot Bunny had done it.
  
• He long ago figured out how to turn the white noise generator ("soothing rainstorm") doodad we have in his room to its radio setting, and we'd often wake up at 7:00am to the scratchy sounds of whatever band he'd tuned to. We just got Caspian a pair of speakers and Susan's keeping the MP3 player in his room so he can listen to more appropriate music. He woke up at 6:00am yesterday... fortunately he kept it pretty quiet after one... suggestion. He now also wants music on more frequently.
  
• Caspian is drawing a lot. He drew a picture of a spaceship (attached). That's Caspian in the bottom with flames coming out the bottom of the rocket. It has three floors (the yellow things) and light bulbs on top (the round things). He can climb a ladder to change the light bulbs if they burn out.
  

• Susan related a good story inspired by a poster for the film 300. As she puts it:

Caspian and I got started talking about war and fighting.  We talked about how people used to fight a lot more all over the world, and how we are lucky to live in such a safe place.  I mentioned that sometimes, people fight to defend themselves from people who are trying to hurt them.  I then brought up Iraq, civilian casualties, and rebellions, and Caspian naturally related everything to Star Wars.  I told him that our soldiers are good guys, but are told to do bad things, but think that they are doing good things.   So Caspian said that our soldiers were like Stormtroopers, he said that the Stormtroopers probably thought that they were doing the right thing also.  Deep.

• Caspian is finally able to role play with his action figures without lots of prompting. I found him having a Luke/Wedge conversation about X-Wings the other day.

And only tangentially Caspian-related:

The latest Star Wars lightsaber toys are really cool! When I was a kid, this was as cool as they got:

• Inflatable sabers - the toy, store display
  
• Telescoping sabers (Droids was the final vintage toy line) - I never saw these!
  
• They also had (unofficial) solid plastic sabers that made a "whoosh" sound thanks to some sort of resonator in the handle

With the new movies, they've gone through several iterations - light up/telescoping/electronic, cheap ones, flashing ones... but they were all either cheap or didn't retract the blade fully. The newest ones ("force action") retract the blade fully and even have a spring-loaded ejector so you just press the switch and the blade springs out. Very cool.