Because we are moderately extravagant, Ty and I subscribe to a variety of cable channels. Because we are moderately cheap, we almost always refuse to pay for additional On Demand-type services. Therefore, we must keep ourselves content with the free On Demand offerings for any given time period.
Because we have twin boys and also have jobs and also occasionally feel the need to maintain sanity, we allow our children to watch a small amount of television, even though they are shy of two years old.
Against our better judgment, we opened the
Barney and Friends floodgates. My dear readers, please learn from my mistakes.
Barney delights my children. They happily watch and sing and clap while Ty and I sit on the couch, moaning, groaning, smacking our hands to our foreheads, and muttering occasional under-the-breath phrases to each other such as "stupid," or "saccharine," or "contrived," or "fake," or "please stab me in the eyeballs with a sharpened spoon." We vow to show no more Barney. Then, the inevitable end of the episode approaches, and Barney sings "I love you, you love me, we're a happy family..." and images of children cuddling with their family members are displayed, our children crawl into our laps and cuddle with us, and we, of course, soften and melt and decide, oh, okay, maybe just a little more Barney in the future.
Not long ago, our cable service offered six episodes of Barney On Demand. In a tired stupor, I turned on one of them, which featured B.J. (tee hee) playing with balls (tee hee HEE). At one point, a whole bunch of balls of different colors fell on her (him? it?).
She might as well have reached through the television and offered each of my children a simultaneous ice cream cone and back rub.
"Oh no!" I said to my sons, cheerfully. "All the balls fell!"
They looked at me, their eyes huge.
"More Oh No?! More Oh No?!"
"Sure," I said, rolling back the footage. They watched it again, enthralled.
"More Oh No? More Oh No?" They watched it another half a dozen times.
This was, maybe, six weeks ago?
They are still asking for "More Oh NO?!" a good four or five times a week.
Here's the problem: the episode has DISAPPEARED. The cable offerings went from six episodes to four. I watched each of the four episodes TWICE just to make sure I wasn't missing the clip.
I did at least an hour's worth of research and I'm pretty sure I FINALLY figured out the name of the episode ("Let's Play Games!"), as well as the season (9) and episode (12). But I can't find it on VHS or DVD anywhere.
Oh.
NO.
