Top 8 of '08: #1 - Stella Meets Star Wars

And now for something completely different.

2008 is when my daughter Stella learned to walk and talk. Inarguably, these are important milestones in a toddler's life. Perhaps a less-recognized milestone is when a toddler first becomes aware of Star Wars. A caveat: I have no interest in brainwashing Stella into being a little Star Wars fan. I want her to feel free to enjoy any suitable entertainment she chooses (and for that matter, we're not allowing her to watch TV yet anyway). As an aside, the photo is Stella wearing her mom's vintage underoos, so that's not me brainwashing either! :-)

However, when she's seeing my basement full of Star Wars memorabilia every day going in and out of the house, it's inevitable that she would start to have some interest. I stepped very carefully in letting her walk through the collection for two reasons. One is safety: there are a lot of fragile statues on glass cabinets she needs to stand back from. The second is I wasn't sure what she'd make of some things, like the life-size bust of Bossk or the large Sideshow Jabba. Would they scare her? Despite these concerns, Stella was insistent on a visit, and over time the occasional visit became a daily tradition. It turned out the only thing that scared her was toys with electronics and motion. As long as everything just sat motionless, she was good with it. She's also been good about not running and being cautious about stepping up to things.

One of our favorite activities has been naming things we see in the room. Early on she developed a sort of mantra, a particular order in which she liked to name four objects. The four things she was so interested in were the Sideshow 1:1 Yoda Bust, the Sideshow 1:6 Jabba, the Pepsi life-size Watto, and the Sideshow 1:1 Bossk Bust. Over and over she would visit those four in that order, naming them. Eventually we hit a point where she'd run through the list out loud in the car, or at a restaurant, or down at the beach. I never knew when we'd have our little conversation, which always went as follows:

Stella: "Yowie"
Me: "Yoda"
Stella: "Jobby"
Me: "Jabba"
Stella: "Wahwo"
Me: "Watto"
Stella: "Boss"
Me: "Bossk"

Having completed our chat, Stella would invariably sit back with a curious little smile of satisfaction on her face. I bet we ran through this chat a hundred times or more in the last few months of 2008.

Of course, she can now name many more things she sees and is working on short sentences. It struck me how transient her childhood will be when the other day she said "Jabba" with perfect pronunciation instead of "Jobby." I have no idea how long she'll be interested in visiting the collection or naming these characters. It will be a long time until we show her any actual Star Wars content, and by then she may have completely moved on, which is cool.

However, this little period of sharing Star Wars with my daughter in our small way is something precious I'll never forget, and that's why it's easily my favorite Star Wars memory of last year.