This past weekend, we had friends from out of town come visit, bringing their eighteen month old daughter with them who loves chocolate and musicals starring Julie Andrews (well, Sound of Music and Mary Poppins . For some reason, I think they want to wait a few years before exposing her to Victoria/Victoria and having to explain cross-dressing and homosexuality -- go figure.)
Thrilled to have someone who shares my main passions in life (although I do need to work on her to expand her repertoire to include Danny Kaye), I prepared for the visit by stocking up on several forms of chocolate and dusting off my Mary Poppins DVD.
Sure enough, within two hours of hitting the door, the request was made to watch "Mary"(at a year and a half, she rules the world with about four basic words: Mama, Daddy, No and Mary. She knows more, but combined with a smile, these generally get her pretty much everything she wants).
Since I was up to my elbows in spaghetti and meatballs, I assigned Tim the honor of popping "Mary" into the DVD player--big mistake.
After insisting on putting in a fairly complex and rarely working sound system two years ago, Tim has learned precisely four things: TV on, TV off, change channel, and increase volume (like the baby, he finds these four are adequate to rule his world).
Tuner? CD? DVD? Cable goes off? That's what I am here for. The panic that fills his eyes when I travel without him was touching until I realized it was the thought of being without CNN for five minutes that motivated it.
After trying to play the DVD through the (apparently) CD only sound system, he eventually found the DVD player...but it wouldn't open. It wouldn't even turn on, despite the green light on the front (I guess green for the people at Yamaha doesn't mean go).
Many buttons were pressed in many different combinations. Many curses were bitten off with many different grunts and groans. All to the accompaniment of the baby carefully enunciating "Mary" and pointing to the TV screen as though Tim was a bit on the slow side and needed some extra help (Hmmm.)
With remarkable calm (for him), Tim abandoned our fabulous, high-tech surround sound system and settled for playing "Mary" on his laptop...which worked fine for the first ten minutes, then it started freezing and skipping. One minute Mary was floating in to save the day, the next, she was mixing up a batch of rum punch (Let's see that on The Nanny show).
Hoping it wasn't the DVD itself, we moved on to Tim's old portable DVD player, but that was broken (now I remember why it is his old DVD player), and wouldn't even turn on properly.
The poor child was by now surely thinking to herself, "I've landed in a house of dummies. Mom and Dad can do this with one hand tied behind their back," as she patiently repeated "Mary" and watched the opening sequence eighteen times on progressively smaller screens. (At one point, I was sure she was trying to spell it to see if that might help. I distinctly heard her singing the ABC song under her breath).
Our fourth (and thankfully final) attempt was made with Tim's new DVD player (which he had never opened and so it naturally needed charging).
At last though, "Mary" was up and running (and by now, we all knew "Spoonful of Sugar" backwards, forwards and upside down).
The baby settled down very happily for the next hour and a half, although I'm certain I saw her throw several pitying glances our way and look wistfully at the big, dark TV screen.
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