Play Time At the Homestead

Sweet Boy’s newest thing is to play “Diego Animal Rescue” with me. Now, granted, without cable/satellite tv we could have prevented his exposure to the world of Dora but -knowing the only cultural things he will get from my side of the family include insanity & a really bad rez accent- we figure Dora is about the only chance the boy has of cultural exposure…. Especially now that Imus is off the air.

So we play animal rescue and, “Mama, you be’s the shark and I will rescue you” and we play and play, stopping only to sing along loudly when a song we like comes on the radio. (I take it back… cultural exposure includes singing along with Tim McGraw…. Loudly, in a gawdawful Southern accent.)

And while we are playing I sing, “Dora, Dora, Dora the Librarian” because that’s what Elle sings when she plays Dora and, like so many things Elle says, it sorta rolled around the edges of my brain until it became firmly lodged front and center… probably right in front of the part of my brain that knows where I hid that last bottle of really good tequila.

Except you kinda have to sing it (bright and pippy) like this, “Dor-la, Dor-la, Dor-la, the li-BRARE-ian” and I wish I could read music so I could write music so you could get the catchy, catchy tune and then it would be permanently etched on your brain too…. Like that time you accidentally saw your middle school math/pe teacher wearing nothing but a jock strap and knee-high socks with red bands around the calves…. Sorry, but I will never look at red bands the same way again.

And it goes along fine until Sweet Boy runs out of animals he knows (this takes a long, long time….) and he starts making up animals…. “Mama, you be’s a gur-lunga-lunga and I will rescue you.”

Um. Just what sound does a gur-lunga-lunga make and do they enjoy tequila??