I’m glad I found the Captain Underpants books. JMan, who can read pretty well, eschews books for toys of action. He has just turned 7, and before I found those books by Dav Pilkey, he had a hard time sitting still for books. He can add numbers in his head, but is loathe to do it on paper. He can derive the powers of 2 up to 1024, but doesn’t want to do it on paper.
The Captain Underpants books, for those who don’t know them, feature a couple of boys who are actually good kids, but get into trouble at school. The principal is Mr. Krupp, and some other members of the faculty have names like Miss Directed and Mr. Fied. The story line for the books is that the boys had made comics featuring Mr. Krupp as Captain Underpants and distributed them to other kids on the playground. They make the mistake of hypnotizing Mr. Krupp and he believes he is Captain Underpants and continually gets into misadventures.
JMan loves the humor, much of which is based on a variety of bodily excretory functions, the hand drawn comics, and the subvesiveness of it. So he made a comic last night, with me as Mr. Krupp and he and his class as the boys. The Kill Daddy part was accomplished with neuqular weapons (misspelled words are a feature of the comics in the Captain Underpants books) targeting my belly button. And lots of high pitched giggles.
More than once, I have thought to myself that he isn’t afraid of me. For someone who grew up in an authoritarian household where fear of God in the abstract was replaced by fear of Dad in the flesh, raising a boy who does not fear me is a blessing. I think he feels safe with me.