More Bear, Please!

Parent teacher conferences are barely over. Matt's out of town til Sunday. Sam's running all over town with choir and rehearsals for "A Christmas Carol." He gets to play the spooky kid "Want" who sits on the grave at the end of the play :-) I have a mountain of planning to do and lamination to cut out. And a million things to return to Old Navy. So weekends are not so much, well, anything but running around.

But that's not why I'm blogging today. Today I'm blogging about Bear. Not just any bear. Bear. See, Molly has had the great good fortune or misfortune (depending on your perspective) of landing in a TV obsessed family. We watch a lot of television. And so does Molly. Our DVR is filled with old "Daily Shows" and "Mad Men" and "Sesame Streets." Something for everyone. But Molly is a discriminating television viewer. She won't watch just anything. But the things she loves, she LOOOOOOOVES. And she wants to watch them again and again.

It started with "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report." She calls both shows "Obama," and she's generally perfectly happy to sit through them. Because she's got a finely-honed satirical comic sense.

But lately, things have gotten more stratified. We have hours of "Sesame Street" on the DVR. But recently, we discovered an episode where Oscar the Grouch is the anchor of GNN--"Grouch News Network"--and he goes around Sesame Street looking for the yuckiest, grouchiest news. Specifically, he discovers that Horatio the Elephant is stuck in Maria's bathtub. Molly has watched this episode so many times--hell, we've all watched it so many times that we can reenact it--but Molly's watched it so many times, that as soon as we pull up to the house after we pick her up from daycare her first words are "More Oscar Pleeeease." We have tried other episodes of "Sesame Street," but nothing is acceptable. Even the episode where Gilbert Gottfried is "Denny the Distractor" and his job is to distract Telly, who was trying to recite the alphabet as a contestant on Guy Smiley's game show.

But it doesn't stop there. A couple of weeks ago, we watched an old episode of "Teletubbies," featuring a little Punch-and-Judy-type Italian handpuppet who runs around a house and sings, badly from the windows in an operatic voice. Molly calls him "Bear." She loves "Bear." She thinks "Bear" is the best, most entertaining singer she's ever heard. She would watch and re-watch "Bear" for hours, if we let her. "Bear" even caused a major blowout between Emma and Sam, because Sam got really sick of "Bear" and he accused Emma of goading him by continuing to play "Bear" for Molly. When Molly watches "Bear," and he's done singing she cheers "Yay, 'Bear'!" Or she says "Oh, 'Bear,'" with a kind of affectionate mock-exasperation, like "what have you gotten yourself into now, 'Bear'?"

But really, I can't even do "Bear" justice in a description. You really, truly, have to see him for yourself:




You can see the appeal.

It's mutated from there, of course. Now Molly's really gotten into all the opening theme songs for the shows the rest of us watch. She likes the part of "The Simpsons" where Homer says "'Doh!" so she says "More 'Dope'" and we watch that over and over. Sam and Emma like to yell "Gone!" at eliminated contestants in the opening credits of reality shows so now we watch "More 'Gone'" at the start of "America's Next Top Model." She discovered the theme music for "Mad Men" where the guy's falling, and so now we have to watch "More Song." The other night we had to watch "More Opening" to see the title credits of "The Office" 3 or 4 times. It's a wonder we get to watch anything at all. :-) Perhaps that's her diabolical plan.

Hair Update

Molly has dancer's legs. They're sturdy and strong. She's got these ridiculous calves that are completely well-defined and strong. And she's got my feet. A gajillion years ago when I took ballet, the one good thing that anyone ever said to me about my dancing prowess was that I had dancer's feet. They're basically rectangular, so the big toe and the little toe are almost on the same plane. It makes for a nice, stable dancing base and it's the best for toe shoes. Pity those folks with long feet and big toes that are much higher than their little toes--toe shoes are a nightmare. Molly's got my feet. They're adorable and square and they'll make a great base for dancing. I think she'll start with ballet but she'll decide it's too fussy. My bet: in the end she'll go a bit more avant: more Twyla Tharp or Alvin Ailey or Hubbard Street.

Right now she's doing a line dance with the Teletubbies.

We have to file a one-year post placement report for Ethiopia. Hard to believe that we've had Molly for a whole year already. It's amazing how much happened. A year ago today we were on a plane heading for Paris, to spend four days before we went to Addis. Or maybe we were already in Paris, sleeping off jetlag.

So in the service of listing Molly's accomplishments for the Powers that Be in ET, I counted over 30 words that Molly will say independently: from "all done" and "eat" to "sheep." She says "juice" (j00-eece) and "cookie" and "yogurt" (yo-yo). And she pooped in the potty last week. Of course, since then she's had no interest in trying again. Instead, she plays with the fab new Elmo potty seat we got her and says "Elmo poop." Which I'm sure he does, although I've never thought about it before.

Here're a few new pictures of Molly. In the winter and spring, after a few days, her hair straightened out into kinda wispy soft flyaways. But now that it's summer in Wisconsin (read: 100 percent humidity) she's always got this head full of crazy curls. They're still not the tight little curls--they're big fat soft curls that corkscrew out all over her head.

Molly is "hiding."