why zombies?

Somehow it worked out that I give E a reward after she eats 20 servings of vegetables, which takes about 2 weeks. What she chose this weekend was to sleep with Mommy. So Friday night she was pretending to read me a story in bed, and this was the opening line:

"In the soft and chilly air, the zombies come out."

Then she got distracted and I never heard the rest of it, but I thought that sounded downright literary!

Yesterday, I asked E what zombies are. "They're monsters who don't have any people inside them." Where do they live? "Underground and in brown water underground, like under the ocean."

At the preschool months ago there was a sign up listing what each child said they were afraid of. There were things listed like lightning, snakes, spiders, and beside E's name it said "zombies".

So, you may ask, why is a child this age so fascinated with zombies? How does she even know about them?? Well, this is what happens when parents don't do sufficient Netflix research. Last year sometime (I think) E watched "Scooby Doo on Zombie Island," a recent cartoon movie, and I realized that these monsters were really monsters, not people wearing masks in true Scooby-Doo tradition like I grew up with. I thought that was too scary for a 3-4 year old, whatever she was at the time, and steered her away from that particular movie for a long time saying it was too scary for her and she wasn't old enough. Of course, she asked why. So I said it was because the monsters didn't have people inside them like in the other Scooby-Doo movies. She knew what I meant and she had had a nightmare about it, so she went along with the new rule, but of course it just added to that movie's mystique!

She likes scary movies and stories and it appears that she can handle things meant for kids a couple years older. I've been alert for nightmares but there aren't any, anymore, for months, so she's watching Zombie Island again. She doesn't know that zombies are supposed to be dead people come back alive and I'm not telling her that! I guess they shouldn't be any scarier than werewolves or ghosts, but they're just gross. Anyway, we haven't really talked about death yet. There's just that song "I know an old lady who swallowed a fly"....

I'm just waiting for more questions! Or repercussions.