Of all the quirks and vile innovations of the Dora the Explorer show, the worst must be the cloying call-and-response that occurs with soul-murdering regularity. It pains me to do this, but as an example, here is a brief snippet of Dora-dialogue, a written record of 2.5 minutes of my life that I’ll never get …
Monthly Archives: July 2011
She Shat in Anger, and Other Failures of Potty-Training
Is there any early-parental activity as fraught as potty training? Breast-feeding, maybe, but the anxiety that entails usually engulfs just one of the parents. No, getting your child—who might be a year old or 2 or 4—to micturate and defecate in the appropriate place can be maddening, and success or failure seems to dictate what …
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Elvis Costello’s Little Killers
We had the kiddies listening to some Elvis Costello yesterday because, well, screw the Wiggles. But it led to a conversation with our five-year-old daughter about what the song “Alison” is really about. For those unfamiliar with the song, here’s the second verse and chorus: Well I see you’ve got a husband now. Did he …
Awkward! (A conversation about race and fathers, with our nanny.)
With almost no exceptions, my experience with Ellie’s nanny, who has been with us for about four months, has been great. The baby loves her, Tomoko respects (and likes) her, and I find her calm to be an entire separate, and reliable, infrastructure in the system of our parenting. But I did have one whopper …
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