A Quest to Save Harmony Chord Island (& My Sanity)
We’ve all done it – turned on the youngest child’s favorite show just so you have a slight chance of getting something, ANYTHING, done around the house. I mean, come on, the dishes have yet to magically put themselves in the dishwasher on their own and I haven’t yet figured out where to buy a broom that sweeps on its own, so SOMEONE has to do it. And in all my years of raising 5 kids, I have yet to successfully accomplish the super-mom power of effectively sweeping a floor with a baby chasing the broom. It just doesn’t work.
With Kid1, it was the Doodlebops. Kid2 was unnaturally obsessed with Elmo & Little Einsteins. Kid3 had Little Einstein & Peppa Pig. Kid4 was Peppa Pig and Caillou.
Now, at 7 months old, not a single morning can start without Mickey and his friends. And not just ANY episode. It HAS to be Mickey’s Pirate Adventure. I’ve tried other episodes. Yah, no. That doesn’t fly.
And God forbid the episode gets accidentally deleted from the DVR. Can you say “hell on earth?” Think I’m exaggerating? Ha. A couple months ago I accidentally “overbooked” our DVR without deleting a bunch of the shows we had already watched but had not yet erased. That meant that once the DVR ran out of room to record, it started deleting files, starting with the oldest. Seeing that the treasured Mickey’s Pirate Adventure was recorded back in the beginning of the year, it was the oldest recording on the DVR.
I have to add here that Mickey’s Pirate Adventure is not a typical Mickey Mouse Clubhouse episode. It is an hour long inst
ead of the standard 30 minutes like the other episodes. And, to make matters worse, I haven’t seen it come up as a re-run since I initially recorded it.
I panicked.
Frantically, praying to all that is holy and good, I scoured the upcoming listings on the guide. Please! Please! Please! There is a God! In three days, Mickey’s Pirate Adventure would come on. Once. I set the recording, and set the lock feature so that no one could cancel the recording or delete the file once it was saved to the DVR. Yessssss!
Then it dawned on me that I had three days without Kid5’s beloved Captain Mickey and Goofy’s grand-pappy, Captain Goof Beard.
For the next three mornings, I was helpless to soothe our tiny mousketeer, as he cried,
hugged his tiny stuffed Mickey Mouse, reached out for the TV, wouldn’t nap, and crawled around cranky and sad. It wasn’t just the baby that suffered. Or mommy. The entire family felt the impact of Captain Mickey-less mornings. We tried other episodes that we knew he liked. But once we got past the standard intro to the show and it was clear that we would not be singing along to the Pirate Mickey song, it was game-over.
Three mornings passed before the time came for the treasured episode to come on. And when it did, not only did it get recorded, but there was Kid5, sitting smack dab in the middle of the living room floor, cheering along with every song, every “oopsie-daisey,” and every “yo-ho!”
Captain Mickey will NEVER be deleted again!
