Cars

If you know the real name of the fictionalized race car called the King (in Disney/Pixar's CARS), then you like me, have watched the movie over 1 gazillion times!!!!! For those of you that have not seen the movie as much, his name is Strip Weathers!

My son has been watching Cars (or as he calls it My Queen for McQueen) as much as possible for about 2 months now. I know I know - we shouldn't let him watch that much TV but we can get so much done!!!! Now my husband and I have seen it so many times that we can recite the whole movie from another room and are beginning to find flaws in the previous brilliant movie. Why didn't Mack know that McQueen had activated the back door and was not longer in the trailer? If there are 250,000 cars there as spectators at the California race, how big would the track stands have to be to accommodate them all? These are just a few of the many questions that we have discussed before, during, and after our many viewings.

Here is the problem I have. It is a brilliantly conceptualized movie that we both loved the first 50 times we watched it. I mean the bugs are VW bugs and the mesa are in the shapes of cars from the 30s and 40s. As historians, we love the story of the how the federal interstate system changed America and changed the way we traveled (for good and bad). But now I dread the movie and that is my sadness. I hope that one day I will be able to watch it with fresh eyes and see all the wonder I saw the first 49 times. For now, I need to go reset the DVD player.

The Battle of the Juice Box

Our son turned 2 at the end of July and we steadied ourselves for the dreaded terrible twos. And so far we have seen evidence of what everyone warned us about but most of it is just funny. I'm sure we are causing him long time psychological harm but my husband and I have a hard time not laughing at him when he throws one of his fits.

Perfect example today! I was in the bathtub and I heard Will and my husband discussing what Will wanted to drink for breakfast. Juice was ordered and so my husband opened the refrigerator and produced a juice box. But Will didn't want the straw inserted into the juice box. He just wanted to drink from the hole in the top. My husband tried to explain to Will that unless he put the straw in the box, the hole will not be open for him to drink from.This made no sense to Will - he wanted the juice box immediately without the straw. So my husband handed him the juice box and to no one's surprise, Will got angry that the hole in the juice box was not open and that the juice was not flowing freely. He pushed the box back at my husband and with an expression like "Do something!" My husband took the straw and inserted it into the juice box and handed the whole thing back to Will. This caused great screaming, crying, and out and out rejection of the juice box. He didn't want it with the straw and he didn't want it without the straw. So my husband left him in the kitchen to have his fit. When he returned to the kitchen, the straw was on the floor and the juice box was empty. A happy Will sat watching TV in the living room with a purple stain on his shirt. I'd call that a tie - Daddy - 1 (because Will drank the juice box) and Will -1 (because he drank the juice box his way).

A Boy Named Fisho

Last week my husband started singing the BINGO song to our son. He would sing and Will would mumble along until he finally got the words. So one day as they were singing, my husband asked Will what his name was and Will responded very proudly "Fisho."

My husband sang the song.

"There was a man who had a son and Fisho was his name-o.
F-I-S-H-O!
F-I-S-H-O!
And Fisho was his name-o."

Will knows his name but for right now, he is happy to be Fisho.