dere it is, dere it is, dere it is!

Home a lot of this week with my five year-old son. His daycare's closed for the week, and we're also having the bathroom redone. Stifling NYC August heat. So we are watching a lot of cartoons, I have to admit. Fun for both of us. Scooby Doo, Looney Tunes, Animaniacs, Superfriends. DVDs rock.

He likes the newer Scooby Doos, which are much more self-aware, of course, than the originals, and where Fred's become kind of a dim bulb, and Daphne's made herself more useful. And Velma never loses her glasses anymore. Mike Piazza makes a cameo in one of the newish ones. But we also some of the old guest star ones with Batman and Robin and the Harlem Globetrotters. One of my favorite things about watching Scooby Doo with him: the first time the gang got caught by one of those haunted house traps where the stairs collapse and turn into a slide, I said, "It's the old stairs-turn-into-a-slide" trick, and now he says that exact same sentence every time it happens. Which is a lot. It happened in a Superfriends episode yesterday, sending Robin into a deep pit, and he said it, and then he said, "Hey, that's the first time I've seen that trick with a hole at the bottom!" And it won't be the last, my son. It won't be the last.

Animaniacs are fun. Looney Tunes are perfect--nothing I can say right now to add to them. And Superfriends are great, corny, gentle fun.

Yesterday was the first time we tried one of the crafts, from the little sections between adventures. You remember, where Aquaman would show you how to make a piggy bank from an old bleach bottle, Superman would teach you how to bend iron pipe into a pinata, and Wonder Woman would tie a knot in a cherry stem with her tongue. Uh, waitaminute, no those aren't quite right. Must be thinking of some barely adolescent, David Lynchian fever dream.

So anyway. Yesterday Wonder Woman did have a craft project that we made at home and had a lot of fun with: a balloon powered rocket! And all you need is some string, some tape, a straw and a balloon. And it's pretty cool. You run the string through the straw, tie it between two places, blow up a balloon and tape it to the straw without tying the end. Count down and blastoff, letting go of the end and the ballon-straw rocket shoots on a straight line across the room. I felt kind of redeemed for letting my kid watch a lot of tv. Kind of pathetic, I know.