Reading is Fun, Learning How is Really Irritating

So the boy, as you can see from the little "About Me" section over there, is 5 years old. That, in and of itself, is not a problem. He's adorable and precocious, and just generally a lot of fun/work. But there's a growing issue, and it involves the unholy marriage between learning and entertainment that is PBS (more accurately, PBS Kids).

Our morning routine, at least for the last few months (those months corresponding to those in which I have nowhere in particular to be in the mornings) has been pretty stable. With the exception of the days when Mommy takes the late train and lets Daddy sleep in, we (the boy and I) get up at 7ish, stumble downstairs (he bounds, I stumble), fish a granola bar out of the box, and turn on the TV (at this point, a lot of you parents out there are thinking "Gah! You turn the TV on in the morning? Don't you know that the latest research indicates that the developing neuroreceptors of preschoolers are 11% more likely to show a decreased response to stimuli if they are allowed to watch television before 11AM?!?!? Don't you love your child?!?!?" I'm here to tell you now: shut up. Seriously. Shut the hell up, and go back to making your child a neurotic germophobic wreck by subtly resenting him for taking away what was doubtless a promising social life). The choice on TV was automatic, to the point where we didn't even need to discuss it most mornings. One episode of Curious George, one granola bar, one glass of milk. He could watch the first one (each episode has two separate cartoons) while he ate the granola bar, then get dressed during the second one, and if you need me, I'll be dozing off on the couch over here, the dulcet tones of narrator William H. Macy gently drifting into my last few moments of attempted sleep for the day. When George was over, it was time to put on shoes (both of us), and get off to school/daycare/whatever it is.

Recently, though, events have conspired to change this hard-earned routine, and I'm partially to blame. First, there haven't been many new episodes of Curious George lately, and it really started to get old. If I had to watch the one where George and Hundley are on the deserted tropical island (that exists approximately half an hour off the coast of what is generally assumed to be New York, but I'll save that for a "Kids' TV nitpicks" mega-post that will probably have to be published in multiple 8,000 word segments) one more time, I was going to have to take Mr. Macy hostage. So I deleted a few from the DVR, and went about searching for another show or two to record, just to freshen things up. And that's how we ended up with "Word World."

For the uninitiated, Word World is a PBS show where all the characters and many objects are made out of letters that roughly form the shape of the thing. Thus, dog. And so on. In this universe, if you needed, for example, a ball, you would need to find a "b," an "a," and two "l"s, then put them together, wherein they would magically cling together in the shape of a ball. Again, nitpicks aside (what sort of matter are these letters made of? How do they know what kind of ball?), the annoying part is that a) it generally takes the characters the entire 7 minute segment to find the requisite 4 to 5 letters, even though it's a known fact that Dog has a giant pile of all sorts of letters strewn about his house, and b) you have to do the word building while singing "It's time to build a word/Let's build it/Let's build it...Yeah!" to what I believe is an old House beat from the mid-90s. Needless to say, I can't really doze off during this.

Of course, the boy is mesmerized. And this morning, just as I was considering donating the TV to charity or stabbing my eardrums with a knitting needle (and subsequently lamenting the fact that we don't own knitting needles), I hear "Map...m-a-p. Ball...b-a-l-l. Drink...d-...daddy, how do you spell drink?" "Mmmph..rrrgh...erfft...nnnenggh" I replied, which apparently was close enough. "Drink...d-r-i-n-k."

"Good job, buddy," I said, and then it occurred to me. Drink wasn't one of the words on the show, and ball was yesterday. Holy crap, this stuff just might be working. I wonder if there's a new episode this afternoon...