Yikes

The kids have been bothering me for years to take them to the haunted ship downtown. The William A. Irvin/William H. Macy gets "haunted" every year for Halloween, but I didn't think the kids could handle having the bejesus scared out of them from a haunted anything. Also, going out at night really cuts into my Dr. Quinn time.

But this year we finally relented and brought them on the tour. Sam is a big tough twelve year old, so I knew he could handle it, but I was still worried about Kira because, after all, she is a nine year old girl, she should be able to be frightened, right? Wrong. The kids weren't even a little bit scared, hardly even startled. Kira was startled by the first ghoul that jumped out at us at the beginning of the tour, but she didn't scream, she just said, "crap," and the ghoul, expecting I'm sure that he was dealing with a normal person, started laughing at her when he realized he wasn't dealing with anything close to normal.

After that, she was expecting people to jump out at us and wasn't scared at all. She just antagonized the people playing the ghouls, and then they would take it out on me just to prove that they really were scary. Who wouldn't be freaked out to have some teenager in stage makeup sneak up on you and invade your personal space? Toward the end, when people would jump out at us, Kira would say, "Get my mom, she's the one who's really scared," and then they would. My throat was sore from screaming.

On the ride home Mitch asked the kids what their favorite part of the tour was and they both said, "How scared Mom was."