Our little consumer of pop culture

It has become apparent that Margaret is a big fan of Dora the Explorer. At some point, she must have been exposed to Dora at school since she started talking about Dora without any introduction from us. Similarly, she knows that Mickey and Minnie Mouse are on her diapers (care of Huggies) without learning about them from us and will occasionally object if we instead try to put on a (Pampers) diaper with Elmo. But while Mickey and Minnie only come up when we change diapers, Dora has become more central to Margaret's existence. Admittedly, we have recently stoked this interest. A couple of times when I've needed a break, I've pulled up a Dora episode on the Nick Jr. website for Margaret to watch. Once, we also used an online Dora video as an enticement to sit on the potty. And Margaret loves it. She sits quietly and watches with a big grin, occasionally looking around in wonderment at the fun stuff that she's being allowed to view.

This past weekend, we spent a lot of time in Maryland. Now, if we leave the city at all, we typically spend more time in NoVa (northern Virginia) than Maryland since the former is right across the river while a visit to the latter involves various tortuous trips through northwest DC before we get anywhere interesting. But on this "Maryland weekend," we went to Wheaton for dim sum with friends on Saturday morning, went to a party (and got lost on the way) in Bethesda on Saturday night, and visited some friends (and got lost on the way) on Sunday who just bought a lovely (and BIG - we're so jealous) home in Bethesda.

On our way to the first of these trips to Maryland, we stopped at a Target to do our "big box" shopping that is difficult to do in the city. As we walked around the store, Dora was ubiquitous and Margaret spotted her everywhere. Sometimes, we spurred her on. "Who is that on that towel?" I asked, pointing at a big beach towel that we almost bought until I realized that it might cause bath problems if Margaret were to decide that only the Dora towel was acceptable for post-bath drying. "Dora!," Margaret enthusiastically responded. At other times, Margaret spotted Dora on her own. She pointed at some paper cups with Dora on them and yelled "Dora!"

At this point, I'm a bit ambivalent about Margaret's recent introduction to mass pop culture. On the one hand, I know that this type of media worship is inevitable. Kids are simply bombarded with too much marketing to keep this out of their world. And I prefer Dora to Hannah Montana, the appalling Bratz, or lots of other alternatives. (For example, I refuse, I repeat refuse, to take a family vacation to Disney World. Instead, we'll go to Yellowstone. Or the Grand Canyon. That's my current position, and I'm sticking to it until it becomes an existential battle as may happen sometime in the future.) On the other hand, I'd prefer Margaret to appreciate her McCloskey, Dr. Seuss and other books rather than watching some silly TV show. Still, it's really cute how excited she gets when she sees Dora. After waking up on Saturday afternoon for a stop at a CVS pharmacy following our car ride back from Maryland, a still groggy Margaret chortled and gleefully squealed "Dora!" while pointing at a gift certificate with a picture of Dora on it in a small display. And, when she wasn't carrying her minature Lego Dora around, she spent the weekend asking "Where's Dora?"

A couple last points. First, please don't innundate us with Dora stuff in response to this post. (Also, NO BRATZ. EVER.) While it's cute to a point, and we'll probably need Dora underwear at some point if it helps with potty training, my tolerance for that sort of stuff is definitely limited. Second, Margaret is still a big fan of her books. She's started trying to "read" Hop on Pop by Dr. Seuss on her own. As the structure of the book encourages, she gets certain key words ("cup" "pup" "red" "hop" "pop"), but doesn't really get the "narrative" of the book, to the extent that it exists at all.

Since it was warm today (but not too hot since we've been really lucky so far), we set up the wading pool for the kids. Teddy didn't like it too much, but Margaret had a blast. Here are some pics.