Dora-fied

Talk to me, dammit!

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 back:

00:07:37 Will you help us solve the grumpy old troll’s riddle?
00:07:43 Great.
00:07:43 Here’s my riddle.
00:07:45 It’s a toughie.
00:07:47 Solving riddles makes us proud.
00:07:51 How many things are very loud?
00:07:54 DORA: We have to find all the loud things.
00:08:00 Can a drum make a loud noise?
00:08:05 (drumming loudly) Right.
00:08:09 Can a fire truck make a loud noise?
00:08:15 (siren wails) Yeah.
00:08:19 Can a feather make a loud noise?
00:08:25 A feather is quiet.
00:08:27 (whooshes softly) Can a radio make a loud noise?
00:08:35 (loud music plays) Sí.
00:08:40 How many loud things did we find?
00:08:44 One, two, three.
00:08:47 Three loud things.
00:08:50 So how many loud things did you find?
00:08:57 I can’t hear you.
00:09:00 Three!
00:09:01 Three.
00:09:02 That’s right.
00:09:04 You’re really good at solving riddles.

My children like Dora, alas. And they also like Diego, though my boy calls him Dego, gleefully cursing Italians as if he were cranky old Sean Connery in the Untouchables.

But one thing I haven’t been able to understand: they like the show, which consists mostly of Dora telling you to count things or say something and then staring and blinking out at you from the TV screen, but they never answer her. They don’t count, they don’t point to things, they don’t shout ‘jump higher!’ or ‘climb, baby llama!’. They are total rejectionists, just sitting slackjawed and blinking back at little Dora.

Finally, I just had to ask. “It’s not interesting [to answer],” said the daughter, while her little brother looked confused. “I don’t know why.” I spent the next five minutes trying to get something else from either of them. No luck. They are stunned and silent about their perpetual stunned silence.

And there you have it: a TV character who talks too much, and her fans who talk too little.

She Shat in Anger, and Other Failures of Potty-Training

Not my daughter.

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 kind of parent you are: the kind who confidently guides streams of urine into plastic or porcelain bowls, or the indifferent, incompetent kind who allows their spawn to run, piss, and shit wherever they will.

I say this after having tried, and failed, to potty-train my daughter, Sasha, while on vacation in Cape Cod last week. Jean and I are, apparently, the latter kind of parent.

It all began with such high hopes. Jean had discovered a potty-training regimen that held out the promise that we could housebreak Sasha in a mere three days—a sort of toilet-bowl boot camp. With vacation on the horizon, in a place where Sasha could run outdoors, bottomless, we made plans.

And it all should have gone so well. We hadn’t pushed the subject much, figuring that Sasha, a smart little toddler, would just decide one day to be toilet-trained. And she’d already been making tentative steps toward using the potty. At school, she bows to peer pressure and takes her turn on the miniature toilet. At home, she loves reading books about the potty, and can even be coaxed into sitting on it once in a while, for a few seconds at a time.

But up on the Cape, where we let her run around pantsless, it just wasn’t working. She’d hold everything in just fine, and sit on the portable potty for long stretches watching one, two, three consecutive episodes of “Yo Gabba Gabba!” and then, five minutes after standing up and wandering away, she’d let loose with short dribbles of pee on the floor. Or, worse, we’d get in some kind of argument with her—she’s 2 and a half, so everything is an argument, from putting on her sandals in the morning to going to bed at night—and in the depths of her temper tantrum she’d open the floodgates. “She shat in anger,” we’d joke, as if it were the title of some seventies exploitation movie.

As the three-day boot camp stretched into eight straight days of fury-piss, there were small successes. Really small, in fact: Once, while sitting on the potty, Sasha produced the tiniest turds I’d ever seen. Still, we cheered.

But that was about it. Seven days went by, and Sasha was still no closer to being toilet-trained than before. Actually, things were almost worse than before, as now Sasha, charmed by books like “Princess of the Potty,” considered herself a “big girl” and wanted to wear undies instead of diapers. To paraphrase a line in “Go the Fuck to Sleep,” how come you can do all this other cool shit, Sasha, but you can’t fucking use the potty?

Finally, on Saturday night (or was it Sunday morning?), while staying in a fancy-ass hotel on the way back from the Cape, Sasha made progress. Once again, she’d just watched two full episodes of “Yo Gabba Gabba!” while sitting on the portable Potette potty, when she decided to get up and stretch her legs. Two minutes into her bottomless stroll, I suddenly noticed a stream emerging from between her legs. Leaping into action, I nudged her two feet to the left, placing her over the potty. “Sit down!” I yelled—but she didn’t. Instead, she just stood there, peeing directly down into the Potette, amazed that this was happening. She was using the potty! Incredible!

Ladies and gentlemen, my daughter—who pees standing up!

After which, we put on one of her overnight diapers and bundled her into the car for what became a five-hour-plus drive home, guaranteeing she’d have nowhere to shit but her own pants. Awesome.

Elvis Costello’s Little Killers

Inciting children to violence

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 leave your pretty fingers lying
in the wedding cake?
You used to hold him right in your hand.
I’ll bet he took all he could take.
Sometimes I wish that I could stop you from talking
when I hear the silly things that you say.
I think somebody better put out the big light,
cause I can’t stand to see you this way.

Alison, I know this world is killing you.
Oh, Alison, my aim is true.
My aim is true.

Clearly, I don’t even really understand some of that myself. But my wife dutifully explained as best we could: the song is about a guy who used to be with a woman, and now they’re not together, and she’s married and he’s not and both of them seem kind of unhappy.

Good kiddie conversation for a summer afternoon, right?

But here is the genius of the passionate pre-k mind: this was not just a beautiful bummer, as it is for  this was, for Dalia, a call to action. Kids, man, they really take their stories seriously. Good and evil aren’t abstractions for the under 40″ crowd. If something is wrong it must be made right. I don’t know if this is a function of all the facile happy-ending moralizing storybooks they’ve read, or if there’s an innate sense of justice they haven’t yet lost. Either way, Dalia asked a few questions to be sure she understood exactly what had happened–that the woman had a husband now, leaving poor bespectacled Declan MacManus, err, Elvis Costello, all alone.

She thought for a moment, then leaned in with her big doe-eyes narrowing and said, “I’m gonna kill that husband.”

Happy Monday, all.

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 of a chat with her the other day. She is from Trinidad, of African descent, and very proper. I learned a little earlier that she was in the process of splitting with her husband, and had in fact moved out and was living withe her sister (with her two young children).

After offering my sympathy, I asked her what sort of arrangement she managed having with her ex with the kids, and she told me she assumed that they would be with her. In fact, she said, she wouldn’t be totally surprised if her husband cut off relations with the kids and just moved on. I expressed some shock at this—up to this point her description of him had been rather good—and she frowned at me.

“Let’s be honest, Ted,” she said. “We’re all adults. The truth is, black men are more likely to leave their families than men from any other race.”

No need to go into the class, race, and gender weirdness that plays into hiring someone to look after your kids. We happen to be very lucky, our nanny is superb, but it’s still an adjustment on a daily basis.

I just had no idea what to say to that one. I tried mumbling something appropriately liberal about poverty and the alienation it causes (which, I admit, was kinda condescending), but she batted it away as if I hadn’t spoken. Black men, she knew, were no damn good.

I let it go at that, we joked about finding her someone Jewish, and then she went home.

Any thoughts out there? A difficult one for me.