Six Going on Sixteen

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Recently Olivia has become really obsessed with High School Musical, a teenage mini-series on the Disney Channel.  This fictional show follows a group of teenagers as they prepare for their school’s high school musical, and the sacrifices each make along the way.  Each show includes at least one musical number with an associated dance, the steps of which are demonstrated at the end of each episode.

This fascination started when her friend Kate brought the CD into the daycare one day. Then Olivia happened to catch an episode on TV (she’s constantly scanning the Disney Channel on the remote when she gets a chance) and immediately was hooked. Now she knows exactly when it is shown on TV every week and asks us to record the show for her.

She will listen to the CD (thanks to Daddy who bought her the disc one day for being a good girl) and dance along to the music or play the DVR trying to learn all the dance moves until her face turns red and sometimes she’s left dripping with sweat. She did just that this past weekend at the tail end of her virus infection.

I didn’t really pay too much attention to all this at first, so I was really surprised the other day when I discovered that she could sing pretty well to almost every song on the CD.

I don’t know what to think about this fascination.  The show is all about teenagers and I generally have tried to steer her clear of these shows that are not age appropriate.  But the show itself is fairly tame and it does carry a few positive messages.  There’s really not much to object to, and the singing and dancing do spur her to be active in ways that most shows never do.  Nevertheless, I watch her dancing around the family room and mouthing the words to the songs and can’t help but feel that she’s a six year old going on sixteen.

Recently she also developed a hobby to “PK” with daddy on High School Music songs. They each would pick one song to sing and let me be the referee to give the score and decide who the winner is.

Daddy told me today that he had listened to these songs so many times, that during his commute to work, sometimes the tunes of these songs would jump into his head out of nowhere while he is driving down the road.