It’s happened. Cameo has is the age where he can actually sit through a film. Hollie has been desperate for this day to come – absolutely desperate to be able to just chill with them and watch something mesmerising for an hour and a half – and that time has finally arrived.
In the lead up to Christmas on times when the TV was on in the day, Cameo would be captivated by all sorts of things. It started with Shrek. Then it was a Western. Then it was some ‘60s musical. I think there’s something about the score, the pacing and the drama that makes him able to tell it’s a film and it needs all of his attention.
Hollie pounced on this opportunity. He was finally ripe – ready to watch whatever we put in front of him, so it just made sense to introduce him to films for his age. Thankfully, Hollie was gifted something kind of magical by Disney early in December
They dropped a massive box set of their most celebrated titles. Ignoring the racist Song of the South, they go through all of the highlights from their massive catalogue of films and give you just about everything that any Disney fan could want from a film collection. The only glaring omission that I noticed was A Goofy Movie. Beyond that, everything was covered. One day I’m going to sit him down to watch Snow White, Pinocchio, The Jungle Book, and the others that I used to watch with my sister when we were little.
Hollie wasn’t messing around though. She wanted to get straight to it; making the mistake of showing Cameo the massive array that he had to choose from, giving him the opportunity to choose the main irritant in our lives for the past two months: Frozen.
After watching it through once, he suddenly transformed his YouTube Kids recommendations. It went from being a variety of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse videos, Tom & Jerry and Japanese discoveries to nothing but Frozen.
The problem isn’t the content of what he’s watching; it’s the amount he watches it and the insistence that myself and Hollie watch too. It means that three different Frozen songs are stuck in our head at any one time, and we can’t escape it, because we’re only ever a few hours away from the next dosage.
We are yet to return to the book set because of this issue, but will have to find a way to do so without him seeing that there’s a Frozen 2 in there. Hopefully we can push him in a completely different direction and save us from having “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” floating around in our ears at all times.