Thursday, February 18, 2010

The Great Barbie Doll Debate

My daughter loves her stay home days.  We've fallen into a routine which includes an hour of playing Barbie dolls right after breakfast.  We're both in our jammies with our unbrushed teeth and hair.  I enjoy it because it offers a slow start to the day.

Julia has been on a Hunchback of Notre Dame  kick.  She uses her Pocahontas doll (since it has black hair) to play the role of Esmeralda.  Dora gets to be the Hunchback because her head is so big.  Our sole boy doll is Phoebus.  The cast is rounded out with miscellaneous Barbies that play guards, soldiers and the villain Frollo.

This is all very interesting.  She loves the part where Frollo is planning to burn Esmeralda at the stake.  My love/hate relationship with Disney kicks in as I have to explain the motivation of each character in each scene.  Most times we set the dolls up in their places for each scene and then talk about why everyone is doing what they’re doing. (My thanks to Disney for putting weird sexual tension in a kid's movie that I can't explain to my four-year-old.)

Julia's happiness revolves around the amount of time I'll sit and play Hunchback with her.  My happiness hinges on my ability to keep from playing Hunchback.  I can take it for the first hour.  After that I'd like to change my dolly’s clothes and have them pretend to do the laundry.  We're embroiled in a Barbie war.

One day, I lured her out of the house with a trip to the library.  She borrowed a copy of Barbie in The Nutcracker  and after watching it we played the Nutcracker story with our Barbie dolls.  Oh, sweet relief.

The next time we played she asks, "Do you want to play Hunchback or Nutcracker?"  Of course, I wanted to play Nutcracker.

"Let's play Hunchback," she says.

So we played her story again.  I just wish sometimes I got to pick.