E-L-M-O: Crack For Babies

In the throes of Elmo withdrawal.

Back in 1996, Tyco introduced "Tickle Me Elmo," which immediately became the MUST-HAVE toy for the holiday season. Some of you might remember that in the run-up to Christmas that year, crazed parents injured unsuspecting toy store workers in an attempt to satisfy their kids' insatiable Elmo appetites.  I vaguely remember the Tickle Me Elmo craze, but being a teenager at the time, I had no real reason to pay close atention to it, or to contemplate what it was about Elmo that was driving all of these parents nuts. 

Reasonable people will kill for one of these.

As the parent of a young child, and with the holiday season fast approaching, I now understand the importance of Elmo, and would be willing if necessary to rip the crotch out of a toy-store worker's jeans to get an Elmo doll (read the linked wikipedia article above so that I don't sound like a total pervert).  Elmo is crack for babies.  I don't know why Elmo is crack for babies, but he is.  And Saavan is an addict.  At 16 months, Saavan has developed an impressive vocabulary, and one of his most frequently-repeated words is "Elmo" (as he says it "Eh-mo").  He has picked up "Elmo" because we read him lots of Sesame Street books in which Elmo is prominently featured.  But what is strange is that the other Sesame Street characters - Big Bird, Grover, Snuffalufagus (I neither know nor care how it's actually spelled), etc. - are all featured as well, but it's only Elmo's name that Saavan repeats.  And when he wants to read any book involving the Sesame Street gang, he refers to the book as "Elmo."  For example, Saavan has a crap-tacular book (seriously, it's terrible) called "Big Bird, Our Kind of Bird," in which Grover explains to Big Bird that he's very kind, and what exactly "kindness" means.  The book is all about Big Bird, and Elmo has no speaking part whatsoever (in fact, he only appears on a couple of pages), but Saavan points to the book and says "Elmo" and is most excited for those few pages in which the bug-eyed red guy appears. 

Saavan's love for Elmo is totally organic - we didn't force Elmo upon him in any way, nor did we highlight Elmo in any of the books we read to him.  He's never seen an epipsode of Sesame Street or any other television program/cartoon featuring Elmo or the Sesame Street gang.  Elmo just became his go-to Sesame Street character, and at first, that was fine.  But then we screwed up.  We don't let Saavan watch TV (although it's often on in the background at our house, and he's a big football fan already), but we discovered that you can watch Sesame Street videos on youtube, including videos of Elmo.  So we thought, given Saavan's love for Elmo, we'd let him watch a couple of lovely clips that we found: Elmo's Song (which is my favorite, and which I may or may not occassionally watch while at work), and Elmo and India Aria sings the ABCs.  (Youtube won't let me embed the clips.  Stupid Youtube.)

Holy crap was that a mistake.  Having only seen the videos a few times, Saavan is now obsessed with them.  As soon as they're over and we shut off the computer, he breaks down, screaming and crying and generally flailing around uncontrollably.  And now whenever we open up the computer for any reason, he runs over begging to see the Elmo videos.  We can no longer say Elmo's name - we have to spell "E-L-M-O" lest Saavan hear it and go beserk.  And we have to explain to him that books other than those that feature Elmo are equally fun to read.  Saavan's Elmo addiction is now bigger than him.  It's effecting our entire family.  We haven't ruled out an intervention.  (It will not be like this one.) 

Requiem for an Elmo.

In unrelated news, last we got Saavan the H1N1 vaccination.  We were never seriously considering not giving it to him, although we did briefly entertain the notion.  Being a parent is hard for a variety of different reasons, but when you have to make a leap of faith and assume that something new being injected into your kid is good for him and will do him no harm, it's scary too.  It's also scary that there is a new virus called "swine flu."  If only they had named it something like "the new flu" or the "2K9 flu."  That would be far less scary.  Anyways, Saavan is now vaccinated against it, and we're hoping that's the end of it.

Now we just need to find the Elmo vaccine. 

Random adorable photo goes here.