This Moment in Bad Parenting is Brought to You by Walt Disney

No. 1 is brilliant. I'm not just saying that because I am her mother, I'm saying it because its true.
She absolutely loves to read. In third grade, they had to dress a soup can up as a character from a book. We glued tree bark to the can, covered the top with spanish moss, and chopped the legs off an old Happy Meal toy to create Old Man Willow from The Fellowship of the Ring, complete with Hobbit feet sticking out of the bottom. She was absolutely adamant that her project represent a character that was not in the movie so her teacher and fellow students would know she actually read the book.

When she was eleven, they sent home standardized test results for reading comprehension which included a helpful list of books approriate for your child's reading level. No. 1's results put her on the level of a sophomore in college, and the books suggested for her were by Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Shakespeare.

Last year, she read the entire unabridged version of Moby Dick partly for ten points of extra English credit, but mostly out of sheer spite.

So when her sixth grade Social Studies class required her to read a historical novel and sent home a list of books to choose from, and she (still a Disney Princess junkie) chose The Hunchback of Notre Dame, I made her read the unabridged version. I figured she was up to the challenge. With the help of a French-English dictionary, she plowed her way through Victor Hugo.

It was a little rough at first, but after the first hundred pages or so she really got into it. Every night at dinner she would update me on the book and compare what was happening against the beloved Disney classic. One evening, she informed me that she only had 40 pages left and that she was going to finish the book that very night. She finished her food and disappeared to her room.

I was in the kitchen when the screaming began. I didn't remember until that very second the Disney-fication of the ending.

No. 1 was inconsolable. "Why, Mom, WHY?!?!? How could Phoebus marry someone else? They hung Esmerelda!!!! And Quasimodo lies down next to her corpse and starves to death? WHY DID YOU MAKE ME READ THIS BOOK?!?!?!?"

My bad.

*NOTE: In all her brilliance, No. 1 pointed out my typos and now they are fixed.*