Spelling Bee

Tonight after a fairly gag-worthy dinner (not because of my cooking, mind you. Have you ever eaten with an almost two-year-old?  'Nuff said) the topic of E-L-M-O came up.

Sidebar:  How do you know a person is a parent?  They spell fast.  Almost as fast and furiously as they eat their dinner in a restaurant with two kids under the age of three.  That's really fast, y'all.

Now back to the topic at hand.  E-L-M-O has been the bane of my existence for as long as I can remember, and even before I had children.  I just hated E-L-M-O and his squeaky little voice and his stupid dancing stuffed animal robot thing that creeps me out just thinking about it.  Ewww.

Now that I have these two mini-me kids in my house, E-L-M-O has been a daily exercise in tolerance.  I watch him only when I absolutely have to, since just the sight of him gives me hives.  We have never turned on the television in front of the tasmanian tot, so he doesn't even know what it is, except something that he can MacGyver his way into destroying.  However, technology has bitten us in the ass. Elmo is on YouTube.

We watch E-L-M-O on the iPad and my iPhone.  The very sight of these two electrical things makes the boy quiver with excitement and squeal, "EH-MO, WATCH WIT MOM-MY."  How am I supposed to resist that?  I CAN'T.

So we lay together in the morning, me holding the iPhone in one hand, precariously balancing it on my husband's hip or a pillow.  I turn on the longest running E-L-M-O video I can find and try to go to sleep for five minutes or so with my arm in a jacked up position, hoping the blood won't drain out of it before the clip ends.

Is one clip enough?  HELL NO.  We watch clip after clip after clip.  I have memorized most of the songs, and can even do the inflections and slides with Patti LaBelle.  Not that I'm comparing myself to Patti LaBelle, mind you.  I might give a Patti LaBelle impersonator a run for his/her money, however.

Basically, Sesame Street should hire me to be on their show.  I know all the music.  I know the entire set by heart.  I know the characters, the monsters, the guest stars, the gaffer.  And they owe me.  They owe me big.  Creating E-L-M-O has taken over any semblance of the normal non-puppet life I used to take for granted.

We put the iPad and iPhone away.  We hid them and basically tried to Hitchcock his little butt by pretending he had just imagined them.  Elmo?  What's that?  A type of vegetable?  Never heard of it.

But he's not easily fooled, this one.  He's smart, which I blame on the manufacturers of DHA and Omega 3 supplements that I have been choking down every day for three years.  All those pregnancy sites and doctors said it would build fabulous brain development in babies.  They never warned me of the babies that would use those big fat brains for EVIL.

So tonight, when the topic of E-L-M-O came up between my husband and I, I spelled my sentence carefully, as I usually do.  "Did you put the iPad away?  If he sees it he will want to watch E-L-M-O before bed."

Then I heard it.  A little voice.  "Watch.  ELMO."

My greatest fears realized.  A two year old who can spell.  And just when I was getting good at spelling out swear words.  How am I supposed to be a grown up now?!