Dora has landed...

As I've mentioned before, I'm one of those awful moms who lets their toddler watch television. (Emphasis added for sarcasm.) For the longest time, it was all about Jack's Big Music show on Noggin (now Nick Jr.), but sometime in the past three months, Dora the Explorer became the television show of choice.

I don't know if it was the fact that we'd seen every episode of Jack's Big Music show ten thousand times and had them committed to memory, or if Angelica just woke up one day and said, "You know what, Mom, that funny looking blue guy and his equally funny looking musical dog are for babies, I'm sophisticated now and prefer my cartoons to go on expeditions, speak two languages and be accompanied by a talking monkey"...either way, Dora has landed big-time in our household, and the fanaticism is quite the force to be reckoned with.

Take, for example, this past weekend. The three of us went grocery shopping as a family, and as we're paused to ponder which type of trail mix to pick up, and which bananas look the nicest, we hear a shriek come from the shopping cart. "DOOOORAAAA!!!!!!!!!" she screams over and over again. Scott and I look at each other...where in the world does she see Dora?

We look up and see a Dora mermaid balloon tied to the banana stand.

She is going so absolutely ballistic over the sight of this Dora the Explorer balloon, that the employee setting up the fruit in the produce section stops, comes over, and admires the fact that she is so fascinated by the balloon, commenting on how she wishes it had been Dora and not Barney for her kids. (Fortunately, Barney has not landed in our house and hopefully will not in the future!) At this point, Angelica turns on shy mode and seems to forget about Dora, thus ending the ear-piercing shrieks previously emanating from her tiny little mouth.

I should add, as a frame of reference, that my daughter has a shriek so loud and so sharp that it could break glass.

Oh, but then came the end of our shopping trip. Those who know us in person know that Angelica being confined to anything, particularly a shopping cart, is a fate worse than death, at least in her mind. We can usually get cooperation for a short shopping trip, but by the end of it she is done, angry, crying, kicking, taking her shoes off, and so on. So she's in the middle of one of her tirades, when we pull into the checkout lane and she goes silent, and looks up.

There was another Dora the Explorer mermaid balloon tied up to the checkout lane.

What followed, if translated into English, would probably have been something like the following:
"Oh mama! Look! Dora! It's Dora! Did you hear me, Mom? It's Dora! Up there! Dora! I can see Dora! Mom, mom, mom, mom looooooook it's Dora! I see Dora! I love Dora! Dora is amazing! Please mama, look! Look! It's DORA!"

In reality, it sounded like:
"SSSSQQQQWWEEEEE MAAAMA! DORA DORA! OH DORA! MAMA DORA! ASDFKJAHFA DORA! DORA OH DORA DORA DORA DOOT DOOT DORA!"

I have to admit, it's pretty cute, though I'm sure the day will come where she'll actually start to ask us to buy the balloons.