This page isn't comfortable.
If you want the comfortable version, the other side of this coin, read here instead:

Open to Experience

If, though, you have ever said that something your child loved was crap, you should stay on this page.


Me (Sandra Dodd) in response to a mother who wrote what I'm quoting here first:
-=-my god, if i have to watch more crap like bob the builder and thomas the tank engine i might wanna kill myself.-=-
You don't "have to" watch it, but it's not crap. One of the smartest boys I've ever known (some people met him at the HENA conference in Arizona in March--Darwin McNeill, who's 11 or so these days) was a huge Bob the Builder fan when he was living in the UK in his younger years. It didn't hurt him at all. It gave him lots of laughs and joy.

Calling something crap has never given anyone joy, but Bob the Builder has.

My own kids liked Thomas the Tank Engine. It's where they discovered Ringo Starr and George Carlin. They're still big Beatles fans, especially Holly. Marty loved George Carlin—books, videos, albums Keith and I owned long before our kids were born—and Marty got to see him in person a few years ago, which is cool because George Carlin died last summer (2008).

When I was little I loved a little TV show called "The Friendly Giant." I was thinking just the other day of finding a picture of the chairs and the fire and use it for art on my chat room page. I still play recorder, and that show was the first time I had seen anyone play a recorder. I found and learned the song that the giant played at the beginning of each show. It was "Early One Morning." Yesterday I was listening to one of the cassette tapes I made the first time I went to England, at a folk club meeting at a pub in St Neot's. I've been interested in early music and traditional songs since I was a kid. It might not be just because of The Friendly Giant, but that contributed.

My mom used to say "Turn that stupid show off." She hated The Friendly Giant.

Please don't tell your children their interests are stupid, or crap. I was sadder when Bob Homme died than when my mom died. He never lied to me. He never hit me.


I was looking for a video of him playing his themesong on the recorder for a whole verse. At the end of this one, he's playing "Early One Morning." It's not the clip I was looking for, but it brought tears to my eyes.


Here's the themesong on harp (with recorder, at first, one Halloween (in Canada, though I didn't know that when I was little). "Scary, eh?"

At 3:06, they do it with bassoon and recorder. That video leaves out the middle of the episode, but the song comes three times. At the end there is recorder and harp.

That song was peace to me, when I was little.

If you need to go to something more hopeful now, click here, but if you want to explore some of the damage that might be done by those who cling to their dissatisfaction with life, there's more:

Negativity



How to screw it up



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