Tourne? Croco?

What do desperate parents do with kids to get them off their backs for five minutes? They show them how to watch TV.

As I am as anti-TV as they come, both my kids started with something which might actually be worse: youtube.

What we let them watch on youtube are nursery rhymes. French ones, of course. My older one started with these, and has some favorites. He has since moved – very quickly – towards cartoons, managing to know by now (he’s not yet 5) everything about Transformers, Turtles Ninja and now, Pokemon. How I hate those bastards. Tears that are pictured as either rivers streaming down the cheeks or water “flowing” horizontally just bothers my brain. Kids with no visible eyes or at least one sexy Pokemon nurse per episode are even more disturbing to me. What can I say, I'm a freak.

But this post is about my youngest one. He started watching the damn nursery rhymes a couple of months ago. And he loves them. He’s got some favorites as well, especially the ones he started with: “Tourne, tourne petit moulin” and “Les crocodiles”. In the meantime he discovered some more. One he likes a lot is about a farm where there are pigs, ducks, sheep, rabbits, cows, and so on. And for each of them there’s a chorus with the corresponding sounds.

So now every time he passes by the PC (or even the TV, as we can watch youtube there as well thanks to some amazing technology!), he looks at me or his father and goes: “Tourne? Croco?”. And if we say no, he continues with: “Pig? Duck? Sheep?”… and so on until listing the entire farm. And yeah, he's not yet 2 years old, but he can perfectly pronounce "Pikachu".

So what choice do we have, other than laugh and go along with it?