Star Wars is a very big deal at our house. I’m not exactly sure why, but from what I remember it started as a joke when my daughter was just a few weeks old. She would make those adorable, frightening newborn squeaks and strange breathing sounds that they tend to do when they’re still getting all that pesky amniotic fluid out of their little lungs, and it sounded just like Darth Vader breathing through his mask. We would use it as a party trick when people came over to meet her. “Look, she said her first word, the Darth Vader noise!” After that, friends and relatives started buying her lots of Darth Vader toys, because what’s funnier than an adorable little baby cuddling with the Evil Dark Lord of the Sith? That, plus my husband’s favorite joke at the time was saying, “I am your father,” to her in a Darth Vader voice about twenty times a day. So I guess it was fate. Now that she’s four years old, her favorite bedtime story is not so much a story but reading chapters from her huge Star Wars dictionary. She has yet to see the movie, but knows that Anakin is from the planet Tatooine and that Hoth is covered with ice. The other night I thought to myself, “Maybe we should be teaching her about real planets,” but then she told me she couldn’t put her pajamas on because she was “in carbonite,” and I realized it was far too late for that. A couple of weeks ago, I handed her an individually wrapped Lifesaver from the candy bowl in the pediatrician’s office after she was very patient while waiting for her brother to finish up with his doctor’s appointment. I was surprised that she didn’t act excited, and instead of eating it in a hurry she quietly put it in her coat pocket. I immediately forgot about it, until this morning when she was leaving for school and saw her take it out of her pocket and examine it thoughtfully. How had she not eaten that yet? I had never seen such monk-like restraint from a kid with candy in their hand. But it all made sense when she asked, “Mommy? How do you use this lightsaber?”